Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary

Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary

136

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary

Edited by

Joselyn M. Almeida

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover image: Steven Folsom, “La Partida /The Parting Charge” Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3032-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3033-6 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Acknowledgments

Not too long ago, writing about British Romanticism’s engagements with the Hispanophone world seemed improbable. Yet against that improbability, the scholarship and interest of Alan Richardson, Marilyn Gaull, Sonia Hofkosh, Jeffrey Cox, Nanora Sweet, Charles Rzepka, Tim Fulford, Joel Pace, Lance Newman, and Jeff Cass opened a space for this conversation, and to each I am deeply grateful. Diego Saglia’s groundbreaking scholarship in this field has continued to generate possibilities for researchers, and this collection owes its genesis and coalescence to his work, generosity, and leadership. As a result of Saglia’s interventions, many of the contributors here — from places as distant as Oviedo, Amherst, Memphis, and Oxford — converged at the “Transnational Identities” conference in Bologna organized by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) and the Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici, Università di Bologna (CISR). The exchanges facilitated at that memorable meeting have given this project direction and momentum. Prof. Dr. Norbert Bachleitner, IFAVL Series Editor for Rodopi, Esther Roth, and Ernst Grabovszki have steered it from conception to realization across time zones with understanding and dedication. The materiality of the book owes much to the generous support of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, Paul T. Kostecki, and the Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, Joel Martin, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I would also like to thank my colleagues Joseph Bartolomeo, Stephen Clingman, Laura Doyle, and Arthur Kinney for their suggestions at different points. Librarians Brian Shelbourne and Steven Folsom from the UMass Image Collection Library lent their digital humanities expertise to obtain the cover image from José Joaquín de Mora’s No me olvides (1824-5) with the gracious assistance of librarians at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I am also grateful to Tom Broughton-Willett for his professionalism, energy, and promptitude when it came time to do the index. Finally, this project would not be possible without the support of my family and friends, and the faith, patience, and support of mi compañero, Martin.

Table of Contents

Joselyn M. Almeida Introduction: Of Windmills and New Worlds

9

Part I: Theaters of Liberation Diego Saglia Iberian Translations: Writing Spain into British Culture, 1780–1830

25

Joselyn M. Almeida ‘Esa gran nación, repartida en ambos mundos’: Transnational Authorship in London and Nation Building in Latin America

53

Tim Fulford ‘El Diablo’ and ‘El Ángel del Cielo!’: Thomas and Kitty Cochrane and the Romanticisation of Revolution in South America

81

Alicia Laspra Rodríguez Fictionalizing History: British War Literature and the Asturian Uprising of 1808

109

Susan Valladares ‘He that can bring the dead to life again’: Resurrecting the Spanish Setting in Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) and Remorse (1813)

133

Part II: Trades and Exchanges Nanora Sweet The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in Felicia Hemans and José María Blanco White

159

Rebecca Cole Heinowitz The Spanish American Bubble and Britain’s Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–1826

183

8

Maria Eugenia Perojo Arronte Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Exchange, and the Idea of a Spanish ‘National’ Literature

213

Jeffrey Cass Fighting Over the Woman’s Body: Representations of Spain and the Staging of Gender

233

Cristina Flores ‘Imported Veeds’: The Role of William Wordsworth in Miguel de Unamuno’s Poetic Renewal

249

Part III: Vistas and Extensions Jeffrey Scraba ‘Dear Old Romantic Spain’: Washington Irving Imagines Andalucía

275

M. Soledad Caballero and JennLIHU Hayward ‘An occasional trait of Scotch shrewdness’: Narrating Nationalism in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico

297

Jessica Damián ‘These Civil Wars of Nature’: Annotating South America’s Natural and Political History in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824)

327

Fernando González Moreno and Beatriz González Moreno (Re) Discovering Spain: English TravelOers and the Belated Picturesque Tour

341

Notes on Contributors

361

Index

367

Joselyn M. Almeida

Introduction: Of Windmills and New Worlds

‘In the rhapsody of his imagination he has discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are that there are no Quixotes to attack them’. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man ‘Thy World, Columbus, shall be free.’ Anna Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

In his mordant reply to Burke’s famous lament over lost chivalry in Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine evokes the figure of Don Quijote, thereby linking the long-standing tradition of romance to the age of revolution. As David Duff suggests, the connection between the two ‘is almost taken for granted as one of the central facts of the literary history of English Romanticism’, given the work of Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, and others.1 Moreover, Paine’s allusion to Don Quijote also bespeaks the recurrence of cultural symbols, discourses, and figures from the Hispanophone world, such as Don Juan, Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, and Atahualpa that circulated in Romantic drama, poetry, and prose. These came to signify the other two massive revolutions that commanded the interest and creative investments of authors, that of Spain against Napoleon and the Spanish American Wars of Independence.2 The Peninsular War, known in Spanish historiography as the Guerra de Independencia (War of Independence), reinvigorated the tradition of chivalry for writers such as Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and Lord Byron. Simon Bainbridge writes: ‘In a period when Britain was taking an increasingly active role in the conflict [...] romance and its associated values provided a powerful construction of Britain’s role that would

1 2

David Duff, Romance and Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2. José Blanco White, discussed hereafter, was perhaps the first to perceive this connection. Scholars in the field are also indebted to José Alberich’s Bibliografía Anglo-Hispánica, 1801-1850 (Oxford: The Dolphin Book Co, 1978) which catalogues a substantial corpus of Anglo-Hispanic works.

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influence the way in which the nation saw its global role for the rest of the century’.3 The publication of Diego Saglia’s Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000) has firmly established Spain as a ‘figurative nucleus of contradictions and tensions, or a “heterotopia”, one of those places which, in Foucault’s definition, “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect”’.4 The representation of Spanish settings, motifs, characters, and cultural impersonations — Southey affects the mask of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella in Letters from England, for instance — can no longer be simply attributed to individual artistic choices while ignoring the large-scale cultural and historical engagement between Britain and the Hispanic world. Besides analyzing the considerable Hispanophile oeuvre of Southey, Hemans, Scott, and Byron and the influential circle of Holland House and Lord Holland, Saglia extends the field through his analysis of works usually overlooked in this context. Walter Savage Landor’s Count Julian (1812) suggests a deconstruction of the ‘exotic medievalism of Southern Spain’ that so attracted Southey, and reconfigures ideologies of patriotism; his discussion of lesser-known works such as Laura Sophia Temple’s The Siege of Zaragosa and Other Poems (1812), William Ticken’s Santos de Montenos; or Annals of a Patriot Family. Founded on Recent Facts (1811), and Mary Russell Mitford’s Blanch (1813) recovers the pervasiveness of Spain in British Romantic poetry. ‘Fictions about Spain indeed negotiate — that is, reinvent, propose, or abolish — ideals about the nation, established religion and the church, reform and conservatism, the family, the woman question, and forms of masculine or feminine subjectivity.’ 5 Prominent in these fictions are epic types such as El Cid, who defeated the Moors (and Cid-like figures such as King Pelayo), tragic Moorish queens, battles such as Roncesvalles, the heroism of the Maid of Saragossa and Spanish women, and the extraordinary valor of British soldiers. Through their work on Felicia Hemans, Susan Wolfson, Nanora Sweet, and John-David López have also contributed considerably to the consolidation of Spain as an object of knowledge for Romanticists. British Romantic writing about Spain can be considered as part ‘of the new historical and political horizon and a new sense of the power of poetry to 3

4

5

Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 149. Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 62. Saglia, p. 60.

Introduction

11

speak it’ that James Chandler and Maureen McLane posit as the distinguishing characteristic of Romanticism as a literary movement.6 The field of presence of Spain’s American colonies as a revolutionary horizon for Romantic-era writers is not as obvious, yet is equally crucial when thinking about Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism.7 For if Spain presented Britons with a theater of war to test liberationist ideologies against a national foe, the Americas promised utopian possibilities that resonated with sympathizers of the French Revolution, abolitionists, and philosophers like Jeremy Bentham. Túpac Amaru’s formidable uprising in 1780 was well known enough that Helen Maria Williams could refer to it in Peru. ‘An Indian, descended from the Incas, has lately obtained several victories over the Spaniards; the gold mines have been for some time shut up; and there is much reason to hope, that these injured nations may recover the liberty of which they had been so cruelly deprived’.8 The popularity of William Robertson’s History of America (1777) contributed to the view of the Incas as a people whose freedom was violently and unjustly repressed, and who were entitled to retribution. Whereas for Robertson conquest was somewhat legitimized by the alliance the Tlaxcalans had offered Cortés during the conquest of Mexico and the resistance led by Cuauhtémoc (Guatimozin), the Incas were another matter. He reflects at the conclusion of the book on Peru: ‘where the restraints of law and order are little felt, where the prospect of gain is unbounded, and where immense wealth may cover the crimes by which it is acquired, that we can find any parallel to the levity, the rapaciousness, the perfidy and corruption prevalent among the Spaniards in Peru’.9

6

7

8

9

James Chandler and Maureen McLane, ‘Introduction: The Companionable Forms of Romantic Poetry,’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 1-9. Michel Foucault defines a field of presence as ‘(all statements formulated elsewhere and taken up in a discourse, acknowledged to be truthful, involving exact description, wellfounded reasoning, or necessary presupposition […] those that are criticized, discussed, and judged, as well as those that are rejected or excluded); in this field of presence, the relations established may be of the order of experimental verification, logical validation, mere repetition, acceptance justified by tradition and authority, commentary, a search for hidden meanings, the analysis of error; these relations may be explicit (and sometimes formulated in types of specialized statements: references, critical discussions), or implicit and present in ordinary statements’. See The Archeology of Knowledge and Discourse on Language, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 57. Helen Maria Williams, ‘Peru’, in Poems, 2 vols (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1786), II, p. 160. William Robertson, The History of America, 3 vols (London: Printed for Strahan T. Cadell, 1780) III, p. 254.

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Injustice at the heart of conquest came to represent oppressive government, as Michael Scrivener suggests of John Thelwall’s The Incas; or The Peruvian Virgin. The play is ‘designed to evoke the British political repression, which by late 1792 included the criminalizing of The Rights of Man, outlawing Paine, and organizing burnings of Paine’s effigy and writings’.10 This version of the play did not make it to the stage; instead, Thomas Morton adapted Thelwall’s story and successfully staged it as Columbus, which subverted The Incas’ radicalism through its royalist sympathies. The Afro-British abolitionist writer Ottobah Cugoano also drew on Robertson’s portrayal of the conquest to argue that the slave trade was intimately bound up with European expansion in Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and James Montgomery afterwards dramatized the dual themes of conquest and slavery in the Romantic epic The West Indies (1807). These works raise the significant connection between slavery, British abolition, and the project of freedom in the Americas, and present a nexus for further exploration. While British writers transculturated discourses about the Americas, a generation of Spanish American intellectuals, led by Jesuits exiled in Italy such as Francisco Clavijero and Juan Ignacio Molina, responded to representations of America in Robertson and Cornelius De Pauw. By 1790, the Nootka Sound crisis in Canada pushed Britain and Spain closer to war, and Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary who became known to the British public as a general in Revolutionary France, lobbied the British intelligentsia for military and political support for a war against Spain, initiating a clandestine, but later very public relationship between Britain and the incipient Spanish American republics. Since Mary Louise Pratt’s significant work on Alexander von Humboldt, her claim that ‘to the extent that something called Romanticism constitutes Humboldt’s writings on America, those writings constitute and explain that something’ has been tested and extended by Nigel Leask, whose work on Humboldt amplifies Pratt’s.11 The research of Jennifer Hayward and Soledad Caballero on Maria Graham’s Voyage to Brazil has shown that gender is a central category when reading scientific and travel writing about the Americas. South America also emerges as a frontier of empire in Alan Richardson’s seminal essay on Williams’ epic Peru in Romanticism, Race, 10

11

Michael Scrivener, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2001), p. 235. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 137; Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 17701840 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).

Introduction

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and Imperial Culture (1994) and in Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson’s Romanticism and Colonialism (1998). Essays on Robert Southey’s Madoc and Tale of Paraguay and the work of José María Blanco White and Helen Maria Williams have continued to expand this research.12 While scholars working on the relationship between Britain and each of these regions have signaled towards the other, this collection shows how Spain and Spanish America are not only fields of presence in their own right, but also constitute what Foucault calls ‘fields of concomitance’ — objects carrying analogic discursive relations specific to the history of the period that speak to larger categories, such as ‘empire’, ‘nation,’ ‘nature’, and ‘freedom’.13 The present collection combines scholarship on British Romanticism, Spain, and Latin America to trace the contours of the Anglo-Hispanic imaginary that emerges through the convergence of these cultures and discourses at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The essays address Romanticism’s poetic and polemical engagements with some of the major historical developments that inform this imaginary: the Peninsular War and its aftermath, the bid of Spanish American colonies to establish independence with British assistance, and the demand for scientific and travel narratives. The first section, ‘Theaters of Liberation,’ examines how Spain and Latin America indexed British attitudes towards Hispanicity, empire, and liberation as both sites became theaters of war. In ‘Iberian Translations: Writing Spain 12

13

More recently, Matthew Brown et al., Informal Empire: Culture, Capital, Commerce (2008), Robert Aguirre’s Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (2005) and Luz Elena Ramírez British Representations of Latin America (2007) have analyzed the role of literary texts and cultural artifacts in facilitating and supporting ‘informal empire,’ a term that gives precedence to British financial domination of the region. These studies, however, focus on the second half of the nineteenth century, though Aguirre devotes a chapter to William Bullock’s collecting activities in Mexico in the early 1820s, akin to Lord Elgin’s in Greece. For recent reassessment of Romantic era writers and Latin America, see Alan Richardson, ‘Epic Ambivalence: Imperial Politics and Romantic Deflection in William’s Peru and Landor’s Gebir,’ in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) pp. 265-82; Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Joselyn M. Almeida, ‘Conquest and Slavery in Robert Southey’s Madoc and James Montgomery’s The West Indies’, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. by Lynda Pratt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 151-166; Nigel Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America,’ in Pratt, Southey, pp. 133-150; Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, ‘Thy World Columbus Shall Be Free’: British Romantic Deviance and Spanish American Revolution’, European Romantic Review, 17 (2006): 151-159; Jessica Damián, ‘Helen Maria Williams Personal Narrative of Travels from Peru to Peruvian Tales,” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, (2007) . Foucault, p. 58.

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into British Culture, 1780-1830,’ Diego Saglia examines the ‘uninterrupted recycling of images of Spain’ as an ‘immutable and backward place’ in British literature until the events of 1808 changed the direction of this iconography. The war brought with it a need for maps of Spain that actually reflected its landscape. As Saglia points out, ‘this lack of accurate maps effectively hampered both Sir John Moore and Arthur Wellesley in military operations’. A reassessment of attitudes towards Spain went hand in hand with the need to have first-hand knowledge of the place. ‘Observers began to chart Spain in ways that sought to make up for the gaps, omissions, and misleading simplifications of the past, and thus return it to the complexity of an intricate geocultural palimpsest.’ Saglia’s essay also examines the impact of publications about Spain in Britain and the United States, in which José María Blanco White plays a significant role. While Saglia’s reading is attentive to the colonizing dynamics inherent in such discourses, he proves that ‘these interventions set in motion forms of cultural exchange where Spain is at the receiving end of translations which it regularly incorporates into its own developments,’ exchanges that problematize readings of cultural imperialism as entirely one-sided. Blanco White’s crucial role in the Anglo-Hispanic cultural and political network is further elaborated in ‘“Esa gran nación repartida en ambos mundos”: Transnational Authorship in London and Nation Building in Latin America.’ Using the work of transnational theorists Thomas Faist and Ludgar Pries, Almeida reads the community of Spanish and Spanish American émigrés as ‘quasi-official agents who could regulate the strategic circulation of cultural and symbolic capital between England, Spain, and the Americas’. She argues that Francisco Miranda, Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán, and Blanco White drew on their experience as transnational agents to translate the colonial idea of the New World into a national framework. While for Miranda and Viscardo y Guzmán this American continental nation must achieve independence to redress the wrongs of Spanish imperialism, for Blanco White it constitutes the part of his ‘gran nación en ambos mundos’ that can regenerate European Spain. Almeida examines Miranda’s El Colombiano (1810) and Blanco White’s El Español (1809-1814) to show how the crisis of Spanish sovereignty caused by the Napoleonic invasion reverberated throughout the Hispanic world and implicated Britain as an ally of both the ‘mother country’ and its colonies. Britain’s dual alliance to Spain and Spanish America is embodied in the arresting figure of Thomas Cochrane, the subject of Tim Fulford’s ‘“El Diablo y el Ángel del Cielo”: Thomas and Kitty Cochrane and the Romanticization of Spanish America’. Fulford analyzes the portrayal of

Introduction

15

Cochrane’s breathtaking transcontinental career in sources as diverse as poems, including one by Walter Scott, popular ballads, periodicals, narratives such as Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1822), and military memoirs. Cochrane first fought in Spain, where as Fulford shows, his actions rivaled Nelson in their daring and bravery. Yet he did not achieve the fame of the lionized commander because of ‘his forthright, noisy and implacable radicalism which had begun when Cochrane found to his outrage that the prize money he and his crew should have received for capturing enemy vessels was dissipated in payments to corrupt naval officials’. Cochrane’s protestations earned him enemies, and after his career as MP petered out, the Republic of Chile offered him the admiralty of its young navy. He then set out for South America with a grand plan to rescue Napoleon from St Helena to enthrone him as king of the independent republics.14 This improbable scheme never materialized, and instead, as Fulford writes, Cochrane was revered as ‘an authentic radical and romantic hero, a man who vindicated the audience’s belief in British, and especially Scottish, military glory.’ After seeing action in Chile and Lima, the Cochranes moved to Brazil in 1823, where they remained until 1826. Fulford demonstrates how the Cochranes gave South America ‘a Romantic and patriotic aura’ and ‘symbolized to liberal Edinburgh the virtues it liked to think were quintessentially British: valour, nobility and the love of liberty’. Alicia Laspra Rodríguez’s ‘Fictionalizing History: British War Literature and the Asturian Uprising of 1808’ addresses poetic representations of the alliance between Britain and Spain in light of the unexpected Asturian declaration of War against Napoleon, and the deputies the Principality of Asturias sent to London to negotiate with George Canning. Laspra shows how Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron rework a major Asturian myth, that of King Pelayo defeating the Moors with the assistance of Covadunga, the Lady of the Cave. Her essay also examines the lesserknown works of John Agg, H.G. Knight, and Terence Mahon Hughes in relation to the poetry of Hemans, Byron, and Wordsworth’s pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra. Her analysis of Agg’s The Dawn of Liberty on the Continent of Europe; or, the Struggle of the Spanish Patriots for the Emancipation of their Country (1808) shows how he ‘strikes the epic note typical of combat literature when mention is made of the continuity between the present 1808 struggle and the spirit of the “ancient warriors” of Asturias’. Like Agg, Knight and Hughes become ‘mediators of a conflict for the general 14

See Donald Serrell Thomas, Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf (Maryland: US Naval Institute Press, 2002), pp. 243-447.

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public’. Laspra offers a ‘parallel reading (literary vs. non-literary), as suggested by New Historicism with its emphasis on the need for combining a variety of cultural components in our interpretation of life and art’. The impact that the events of the Peninsular War had on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s political thought is presented in Susan Valladares’ ‘“He that can bring the dead to life again”: Resurrecting the Spanish Setting of Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) and Remorse (1813)’. Valladares reads both of these plays in dialogue with the significant work that Jane Moody and Gillian Russell have done on the Georgian stage and Saglia’s recent essay on Remorse. For Valladares, Coleridge goes beyond Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which instructed sympathetic responses for audiences, by using technical innovations in theatrical performance to ‘problematise [a] dangerous dependency on the visual, by exposing the ways in which the power of appearances could instill false beliefs’. Her nuanced reading of the interplay between Coleridge’s stage directions, Maria’s agency, ‘the deliberate restaging of Alvar’s Moorish identity,’ and the ‘reworking of Maurice as Zulimez’ demonstrates how ‘Coleridge’s Gothic trappings were increasingly replaced by a much more pronounced interest in Spanish history and a re-evaluation of the superannuated cultural memories attached to Spain’. ‘Trades and Exchanges’, the second section, examines the interactions, translations, and negotiations that structured the cultural, political, and economic facets of Anglo-Hispanic relations after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the restoration of Ferdinand VII to the crown of Spain, and the independence of Spanish American republics. The friendship and cultural exchange between Blanco White and Felicia Hemans gives rise to what Nanora Sweet theorizes as the Anglo-Hispanic uncanny in ‘The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in Felicia Hemans and José Blanco White’. She writes: ‘This geopolitical uncanny comes as a writing-over of empire, Spanish to British; a reversion of New World to Old, Protestant to Catholic, Catholic to Muslim; the Janus-like import-export of constitutional ideas between England and Spain […] and overarching all, a regime of Inquisition that gives truth the character of a lie.’ The friendship and correspondence between Hemans and Blanco resulted in his becoming an inspiration for the main character in The Forest Sanctuary. Sweet’s analysis shows how meaning unfolds throughout a series of symbolic repetitions in which the personal reproduces the political, and the literary reinvents the historical to reveal hidden narratives such as the impossible history of a remorseful conquistador who, after returning to Spain, converts to Protestantism and takes refuge in North America seeking religious freedom.

Introduction

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Sweet elaborates the idea that ‘To read Blanco’s part in this poem — and Hemans’s achievement artistically in concert with him and the entire AngloHispanic and Atlantic field summoned for the poem — is to read paratext interactively with the text and to advance the dialogic properties’ of the poem. Her theoretically rich reading is attuned to Hemans’ reworking of religious material, especially the poet’s treatment of cathedral-like spaces and oceanic images, yet Sweet does not lose sight of the history, texts, and relations that root Hemans’ poem to an ‘Atlantic littoral’ stretching from London to Buenos Aires. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz’s ‘The Spanish American Bubble and Britain’s Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–1826’ analyzes Hemans’ The Forest Sanctuary alongside Robert Southey’s Tale of Paraguay (1824). Through extensive research in primary sources, Heinowitz chronicles the fevered frenzy of speculation that reached its apex just after Britain ratified the independence of the South American republics in 1824. The irresistible desire to invest in anything South American found expression in lavish spectacles and entertainments. Heinowitz narrates how ‘The acclaimed improvisatore Signor Pestrucci regaled high society with spontaneously composed verses lauding [Simón] Bolívar. Melodramatic extravaganzas such The Vision of the Sun; or the Orphan of Peru, played at Covent Garden, dazzling audiences with their “palm-tree grove[s],” “spicy incense,” “Cougars,” “ripe Pine-apple[s],” and “glittering arms”’. The somber poems of Hemans and Southey ‘stand out, not for any allusions to investment, commerce, or indigenous productions, but rather for their complete avoidance of Britain’s financial interest in the region.’ The almost prelapsarian setting of Hemans’ poem, in Heinowitz’s view ‘offers a metaphorized reflection of what Desmond Gregory has called Britain’s “almost invincible ignorance about conditions in Latin America”’. Southey’s Tale of Paraguay also ‘reinforces this message regarding the dangers of the Spanish American unknown […] and it unmakes the enlightenment vision of benevolent colonialism.’ In their austerity, these poems seem to anticipate the catastrophic collapse of the British market that eventually came about once the republics began to default on their loans. While many in the Hispanic community in London returned to Spain or Latin America with the restoration of Ferdinand VII and the end of the South American wars of independence, others like Blanco White, Antonio Alcalá Galiano, and Andrés Bello stayed through the end of the 1820s and into the 1830s; Blanco would die in England. A central preoccupation of both Spanish and Spanish American intellectuals in the recalibration of their countries’ relations with Britain during the 1820s was the question of

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modernity, and how their societies could match the progress that it epitomized. Bello observed ‘Great Britain draws to itself the riches of her neighbors; and if she cedes to one of them the primacy of invention or perfection in some branch of the natural sciences, she is far ahead of them in cultivating the most essential knowledge that is useful to man and that must be promoted in America’.15 To ‘promote’ this knowledge, Andrés Bello undertook the Biblioteca Americana (1823) and Repertorio Americano (1826), and Blanco White published Variedades (1823-1825), a journal that José Joaquín de Mora continued as El correo literario y político de Londres (1826). These journals were part of a transnational publishing enterprise aimed at providing ‘essential knowledge’ to Hispanophone readers, and specifically South Americans, as Eugenia Roldán Vera has shown.16 At the same time, there also emerged a concerted effort to recast the image of Hispanicity in Britain, and to redirect the historical associations that had served to promote sympathy for the Spanish cause during the Peninsular War. In ‘Antonio Alcalá Galiano’s Critical Discourse, British Romanticism, and Anglo-Spanish Cultural Exchange’, María Eugenia Perojo analyzes Alcalá Galiano’s leading role in refashioning the reception of Spanish culture in Britain, and in mediating the reception of British Romanticism in Spain. As Perojo explains, Galiano, who befriended both Blanco White and Mora, developed ‘a political stance with regard to the image of Spanish literature for a British audience, an image very different from the exotic image of Spain that British Romanticism had exploited’. Perojo argues that through his position as professor of Spanish Literature at the University of London, Galiano promoted ‘the cultural and political place that Spain deserved within the context of modern European nations.’ Her astute readings of Galiano’s Introductory Lecture and his articles for The Athenaeum examine Galiano’s thoughts on the origins of the Spanish language, the genealogy of its literature, and the character of Spanish culture. Galiano took issue with the Gothicism that J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi had attributed to Iberia and which had captured the British imagination, and tried to separate the genuinely ‘Castilian’ elements in language and literature from foreign influences, notably the French and Arabic. This Herderian strain in Galiano’s thought raises questions about the limits of Romantic liberalism (much like Jeremy Bentham’s defense of property as the foundation of law when Africans were legally classified as chattel). 15

16

Andrés Bello, ‘El Repertorio Americano’, Selected Writings of Andrés Bello, ed. by Iván Jaksic, trans. by Frances M. López-Morrillas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 4. Eugenia Roldán Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge in a Transcontinental Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

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Jeffrey Cass’ ‘Fighting Over the Woman’s Body: Representations of Spain and the Staging of Gender’, focuses specific attention on the bearing that gender has on cultural translation. Cass contrasts Hannah Cowley’s comedy Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783) with Sophia Lee’s Almeyda, Queen of Granada (1796) and Felicia Hemans’ The Siege of Valencia (1825) to argue that ‘Spain manifests itself as an apt geo-critical landscape because the woman’s body becomes the site of contentious possession’. In Cowley’s comedy, Cass finds that ‘metaphors of battle inevitably illustrate the problems and the possibilities that true free agency implies, for such agency demands a very specific social and political transformation — the establishment of gender equity’. Yet while this possibility is raised throughout the play, the uneasy détente reached at the conclusion of the comedy, which leaves a resentful and potentially vengeful Laura out of the frame of the two couples, reifies heteronormative structures of desire and action. Lee’s Almeyda, Queen of Granada and Hemans’ Siege of Valencia presents women’s bodies as sites of ‘cross-cultural conflict’ in the Reconquista. Drawing on Saglia and Anne Mellor, Cass’ analysis suggests that ‘Given the translatio of the Spanish “nation” in these texts, these British women writers intimate, through their “Spanish” surrogates, that mothers may appear to support a clear and justifiable nationalist ethos, but the gendered “social reality” to which they actually allude is far less solid, and far less certain’. The final essay in this part, Cristina Flores Moreno’s ‘“Imported Seeds”: The Role of William Wordsworth in Miguel de Unamuno’s Poetic Renewal’, examines the long afterlife of Wordsworth and Coleridge in Spain, which, through the work of Miguel de Unamuno, bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Flores Moreno’s thorough analysis of Unamuno’s annotations in the Wordsworth edition he owned and his translations of both Coleridge and Wordsworth reveal how ‘The naturalness of poetic language, the confessional and conversational tone, and the communion of nature and soul proposed by these poets became powerful stimuli for the Spanish author and, more specifically, to the meditative and reclusive aspects of his personality’. Flores Moreno shows that Unamuno’s intimate knowledge of Wordsworth’s work led the Spanish poet to insist that ‘that poetry should not be a mere empty affectation but the vehicle for important thoughts’, a conviction that is reflected in Unamuno’s well-known ars poetica: ‘Mira, amigo, cuando libres | Al mundo tu pensamiento, | Cuida que sea ante todo | Denso, denso.’ Flores Moreno offers a compelling account of how Unamuno appropriated British Romanticism (as Alcalá Galiano did before him) to reinvigorate Spanish poetry and cultivate a culture of musing and aesthetic reflection that invites further

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research into the relationship between Romanticism and canon formation in the Hispanophone world. The third section, ‘Vistas and Extensions’, examines the fascination with travel narratives about Spain and Spanish America in the early and later part of the nineteenth century. Though the Anglo-Hispanic imaginary is largely defined in terms of geopolitical and cultural relations between Britain, Spain, and Latin America, Jeffrey Scraba’s ‘“Dear Old Romantic Spain”: Washington Irving Imagines Andalusia’ renders a transatlantic reading of this imaginary. Scraba’s sophisticated analysis of Irving’s The Conquest of Granada and The Alhambra and the antics of his authorial persona Geoffrey Crayon (who uses Don Quijote as a guide book), recovers the irony in these texts. Irving’s ironic play asks the reader to question received notions of Spain, and, by implication, what constitutes history itself. As Scraba argues ‘The Alhambra develops a tension between Crayon’s indulgence in romantic reverie and Irving’s understanding that this imaginative attitude is an enabling fiction’. Engaging the work of Pere Gifra-Adroher, Paul Ricoeur, and George Drekker among others, Scraba effectively demonstrates that ‘Bridging the affective experience of the past and the active analysis of history, Irving’s Spanish texts are both analeptic and proleptic, looking backward to the ways in which previous generations have understood the past and looking forward to the ways in which future generations might understand him’. These questions and the insights Scraba provides continue to be pertinent to the present day, when tourists visiting the Alhambra can rent audio tours ‘narrated’ by Geoffrey Crayon. Like Irving, Frances Calderón de la Barca was a privileged traveler. She married the Spanish Consul to the United States, Ángel Calderón de La Barca, who was posted to Mexico in 1839. Her Life in Mexico inhabits an Anglo-Hispanic imaginary that encompasses the Americas and Europe as Soledad Caballero and Jennifer Hayward chronicle in ‘“An occasional trait of Scotch shrewdness”: Narrating Nationalism in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico’. They argue that ‘As a result of her allegiances with Scotland, England, Spain, and North America, Calderón’s own identity shifts throughout her narrative and her presence in Mexico is emblematic of the shifting terrain of transatlantic relations.’ Caballero and Hayward’s reading is attentive to the inflections of gender in Calderón’s authorial persona and her interpersonal relationships in Mexico. At first, ‘Calderón attempts to craft an oppositional identity in relation to Creole, mestizo, and indigenous populations around her’; yet, as their analysis makes clear, Calderón’s ideological biases erode as time passes and she becomes more immersed in Mexican culture. She goes from being a ‘melancholy’ traveler, a subject and

Introduction

21

aesthetic position that marks her foreignness in Mexico, to being an ‘insider’. Caballero and Hayward therefore suggest that ‘Calderón consistently attempts to reconfigure her own identity not as either English or Insider, but as both/and: at once familiar and strange, heimlich and unheimlich’. A major contribution of this essay is to show how Calderón alternates these frames to claim a stake in the public sphere, an act that did not go unnoticed. The authors’ research reveals how the response to Calderon’s Life ranged from national outrage in Mexico City and contemptuous dismissal in Britain, to the distribution of her work to U.S. troops as a ‘guidebook’ to Mexico. Caballero and Hayward conclude that while Calderón participates in the imperialistic discourse typical of travel narratives, as several commentators on Calderón have argued, she also ‘increasingly finds herself at odds with her own subject position […] these contradictions force her to revisit, to reconsider, and even revise her initial views of Mexico and her relationship to it.’ Like Frances Calderón de La Barca, Maria Graham has received renewed critical attention in the last 10 years for her writings on Chile and Brazil. Jessica Damián engages this body of work in “These Civil Wars of Nature”: Annotating South America’s Natural and Political History in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824)’. In her essay, Damián specifically argues that ‘By evoking the language of earthquakes and natural history to describe the climate of instability in revolutionary South America, Graham constructs a fragmented yet curiously unified eye-witness account of Chile’s political and natural history’. Graham’s observations as a travel writer, Damián contends, cannot be separated from her writings as an ‘amateur geologist.’ These were published by the Geological Society of London, which later published Charles Darwin’s ‘Volcanic Phenomena in South America’ (1840). Reading the journal as a ‘seismogram,’ Damián shows Graham’s struggle to come to terms with the Otherness of Chilean society, including its political turmoil, the personal trauma of her recent widowhood, and the magnitude of the earthquakes themselves. Damián writes ‘The frequency of Graham’s political observations coincides with the sharp increase of seismic activity in Valparaiso. As the pace towards civil war quickens, so, too, does the earth’. Damián details how Graham’s friendship with Lord Cochrane facilitated her political and scientific investigations, and the scientific debates around Graham’s work once it was disseminated in England. She shows how Graham communicates the fragility of Chilean society after the wars of independence through her careful attention to the ‘revolutions of nature.’ The final essay of the collection ‘(Re)Discovering Spain: English Travelers and the Belated Picturesque Tour’ by Fernando González Moreno

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and Beatriz González Moreno, analyzes the revival of the picturesque in travel narratives about Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as George Borrow’s The Zincali (1841) and The Bible in Spain (1843), Nathaniel Armstrong Wells’ The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain; described in a Series of Letters, with Illustrations representing Moorish Palaces, Cathedrals, and other Monuments of Art (1846), and Arthur Griffiths’ Picturesque Europe (1870). The authors consider this revival in light of developments in book technologies, such as xylography, which gave ‘primacy to the illustrations rather than to the text’. The images that González Moreno and González Moreno include in their essay constitute a catalogue of figural metonymies that become clichés of Spanish culture. Thus, George Borrow enumerated the Spanish types to be found in his Bible: ‘aguadores of Asturias, […], caleseros of Valencia, […] beggars of La Mancha, […] valets from the mountains, mayordomos and secretaries from Biscay and Guipuzcua, toreros from Andalusia, reposteros from Galicia, shopkeepers from Catalonia!, […] And lastly, genuine sons of the capital, rabble of Madrid, ye twenty thousand manolos — men and women rather picturesque than exemplary’. In its belated phase, the picturesque becomes an aesthetic that, in a double movement, erases history from the monuments it frames. To read these picturesque works, one would never imagine that Britons once sided with Spaniards against Napoleon, and afterwards with Bolívar in the cause of Spanish American independence. These struggles for freedom in the land of Don Quijote and the world of Columbus energized the imaginations of Williams, Wordsworth, Hemans, Byron, Southey, and Coleridge — to name the most prominent Romantic writers who instantiated these geographies through their poetic representation of wars, conquests, and terrible victories. Yet these appropriations were not by any means one sided. The vibrant communities that Miranda, José Blanco White, Andrés Bello, and Alcalá Galiano constituted with other Spanish and Spanish American émigrés mediated British perceptions of Spain and Spanish America, while they, in turn, exported what they considered the best of British culture to their societies. The journals of travelers like Maria Graham and Frances Calderón de la Barca disclosed to British readers the fragility of the freedoms that they had supported and reassessed the gendered constructs of patriotism and home. In the wake of Washington Irving’s ironic glance, British travelers to Spain lapsed into a belated, ossified picturesque even as Miguel de Unamuno invigorated Spanish literature through Wordsworth. The essays in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary address Romanticism’s long Quixotic and Columbian legacies in Britain, Spain, and the Americas in the hope that this collection may encourage further explorations of these untravelled paths.

PART I

Theaters of Liberation

Diego Saglia

Iberian Translations: Writing Spain into British Culture, 1780–1830 This essay examines the emergence of Spain (its geography, history and culture) as an object of increasingly frequent operations of reconstruction, description and inscription in British culture around the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indeed, this period sees a general rediscovery of Spain and witnesses the publication of a sizeable number of studies about it in the fields of history, archaeology, art history and linguistics, as well as countless travel accounts and fictional, poetic, and dramatic representations. As a result Spain is mapped and ‘translated’ into British culture through specific mechanisms of adaptation and appropriation, revision and misreading. At the same time, Spain becomes an object of political contention, and the receiver of ideological interventions by the Whig intellectuals and politicians of Holland House and the London Utilitarian circle of Jeremy Bentham. Focusing both on the ‘translation’ of Spain into Romantic-period culture and its use by writers, scholars and intellectuals, this essay aims to reconstruct the context in which this country and its culture become a primary component of the British geocultural imagination between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Untranslatable Territories ‘Spain, in the general, is a large Garden of Butter-Flies, or rather a Hive of Idle Drones, where neither Wit nor Industry is encourag’d’ and ‘A Spaniard is a sort of Amphibious Animal, that is neither Fish nor Flesh [...] neither Fool nor Knave, but both’.1 Thus, in the opening of A Trip to Spain (1704-5), ‘an Officer in the Royal Navy’ introduces a traveller’s account which, in actual fact, amounts to a satirical attack heavily conditioned by the climate of military and diplomatic hostilities of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). And, as these initial sentences indicate, the pamphlet that follows is a comprehensive archive of radically dismissive images of Spain. The nature of the country is fully visible to the author, who presents it as immutable and incorrigible, yet also suggests that it may be amended through some radical transformations. Indeed, the Spaniards are in dire need of ‘new Modelling, and better Government’.2 Similarly, a few years later, in her 1

2

A Trip to Spain: or, A True Description of the Comical Humours, Ridiculous Customs, and Foolish Laws, of that Lazy Improvident People the Spaniards (London: n. p., 1704-5), p. 3. A Trip to Spain, p. 15.

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comedy The Busybody (first performed at Drury Lane in May 1709), Susanna Centlivre paints a humorous picture of the notoriously unbending character of the people of Spain. In her play, one of the most spectacularly successful on the early eighteenth-century stage, the English merchant Sir Jealous Traffick has gone native after many years’ residence in Spain and is now a staunch supporter of traditionalism and rigid social mandates. More dangerously, he is also ready to become ‘a parliament-man on purpose to bring in a bill for women to wear veils, and the other odious Spanish customs’.3 Embodying inflexible traditions and retrograde customs, Sir Jealous carries out the comedic function traditionally assigned to the stock figure of the senex from the classical New Comedy onwards, a figure which Centlivre’s play specifically connotes as Spanish on the basis of a commonplace notion of Spanish identity as trapped in an immutable present. Stereotypically encoded since the Renaissance, such figurations regularly appeared well into the latter half of the eighteenth century. In this later period, references to the unchangeable nature of Spain abounded both on stage, as for instance in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna (Covent Garden, 21 November 1775) and burlesque The Critic (Drury Lane, 30 October 1779), and in fiction, as in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) which transforms the comic script of Spain into its nightmarish obverse, the inverted mirror-image of rational Protestant Englishness or Britishness.4 This line of continuity points out at least two crucial facts. First, it indicates the existence of an iconographic repertoire that was basically unchanged and unchallenged from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, a clear sign that British culture did not feel the need to revise and update its image of Spain, its culture and its people. Secondly, because this archive of images was fundamentally fixed and might be rehearsed ad infinitum, Spain and its culture repeatedly functioned as the inert targets of British discursive interventions, easily available for recurring operations of description and inscription. 3

4

Susanna Centlivre, The Busybody, in Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, ed. Melinda C. Finberg (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), I.1.85. On the formation of stereotypical images of Spain during the Renaissance, see Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), and Trevor J. Dadon, ‘La imagen de España en Inglaterra en los siglos XVI y XVII’, in Imágenes de España en culturas y literaturas europeas (siglos XVI-XVII), ed. by José Manuel López de Abiada and Augusta López Bernasocchi (Madrid: Verbum, 2004), pp. 12775. In general, on images of the Spaniards’ national character, see José Manuel López de Abiada, ‘Spaniards’, in Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey, ed. Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 242-8.

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From the point of view of literary and dramatic history, this uninterrupted recycling of images of Spain evolved, for instance, along the line connecting the intrigue comedies and ‘Spanish romance’ plotlines of the Restoration stage (starting from Samuel Tuke’s 1663 The Adventures of Five Hours) to popular eighteenth-century Spanish-themed comedies best exemplified by Centlivre’s Busybody and Hannah Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783). Yet, the imagery of Spain was immutable not merely because of successful and therefore long-lived literary and theatrical formulas that posited a geocultural archive as an intrinsically permanent construct. This fixed iconography also rested on the fact that the Kingdom of Spain was an enemy of England (and then Great Britain) for much of the period between the Elizabethan age and the reign of George III. As is well known, this geopolitical situation was in place until the outbreak of the Spanish rebellion against Napoleon’s army in the summer of 1808, which eventually led to the guerra de la independencia. As late as May 1808, the only British diplomatic presence in Madrid was that of the ‘consul’ John Hunter, whose powers were limited to the exchange of war prisoners. When, on 14 January 1809, George Canning and Admiral Ruiz de Apodaca signed the ‘Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Alliance’ — soon to be suspended after the disastrous events of the retreat to Corunna and the death of Sir John Moore — their countries were still technically at war.5 In view of the protracted antagonism between Spain and Britain, until the early years of the nineteenth century there was no need to revise a well-established archive of images of the Iberian country that, in so far as it appeared correct, was still essentially useful. One of the most conspicuous effects of this definition of an immutable Spain is that, throughout the eighteenth century, travellers approached it by way of such universally celebrated literary inscriptions as Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735), a French novel incorporating and reworking a variety of Spanish literary sources and therefore perceived as a genuine expression of the Spanish character. Thus, in 1776, Thomas Pelham, the future second Earl of Chichester, set off from Madrid to Cordoba with abundant provisions and a copy of the Spanish edition of Cervantes’ 5

For the diplomatic relations between Britain and Spain during the Peninsular War, see Alicia Laspra Rodríguez, ‘El compromiso británico y la Guerra Peninsular: diplomacia, milicia y opinión pública’, Ciclo de conferencias ‘Bicentenario de la Guerra de la Independencia’, (Segovia: Asociación Cultural Biblioteca de Ciencia y Artillería, Academia de Historia y Arte de San Quirce, April 2008), as well as her essential Las relaciones entre la Junta General del Principado de Asturias y el Reino Unido en la Guerra de la Independencia: Repertorio documental (Oviedo: Junta General del Principado de Asturias, 1999).

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masterpiece. On the way to Andalusia, he wrote to a correspondent to confirm that ‘the inns we stop at [are] the same as those in which [Don Quijote] met with so many adventures’.6 Similarly, in his 1779 Travels through Spain, Henry Swinburne informs his readers that a night spent in the noisy Venta del Platero (near Balaguer in Catalonia) ‘brought to my mind very lively ideas of the enchanted castles of Don Quixote’, while later he dates one of his letters ‘from the Campo de Montiel, not very far from a Lugar de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme’, adding that he is ‘now fairly entered into Don Quixote’s own country’.7 And, in his Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal of 1797, Robert Southey recurs to Gil Blas as a reliable guide around the Peninsula, for instance during his itinerary through León, where he notes that ‘at Astorga, I expected to live well. Gil Blas had fared luxuriously at Astorga’.8 These texts confirm that the act of ‘writing Spain’ implies moving into familiar territory with the help of generally known facts and widely shared topoi. The country appears as a densely overwritten terrain that may be read and interpreted through a multiplicity of fictional transcriptions. In addition, these textual references suggest that, if Spain is ‘translated’ into Englishlanguage culture in the period between the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century, it does not benefit from any re-translation aimed at updating its image and modifying its cultural status. Images of Spain are simply iterated and reworked, because immutable and backward Spain, fixed in time and space, amounts to what has been termed a ‘closed system’ relegated beyond the Pyrenees.9 And from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (and beyond) foreign commentators looked to history in order to find an explanation for this peculiar condition. Thus, the isolation and proverbial backwardness of Spain were usually imputed to Philip II’s legislation that sought to prevent contacts with foreigners and foreign cultures, especially the law on book censorship of 1558 and the statute of 1559 ordering Spanish students at unapproved foreign universities to return home. Historians have recently suggested that, however apparently emblematic, these edicts were

6

7

8

9

Quoted in Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Alan Sutton; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 77. Travels through Spain, in the years 1775 and 1776, in which several monuments of Roman and Moorish architecture are illustrated by accurate drawings taken on the spot (London: P. Elmsly, 1779), pp. 80, 306. Letters Written during a Journey in Spain and a Short Residence in Portugal, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), I, pp. 129-30. See Claudio Guillén, Múltiples moradas: ensayo de literatura comparada (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998), p. 363.

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not as effective as they seemed in cutting off the Iberian kingdom from the rest of Europe. Nonetheless, they served to confirm a general idea of Spain as a place where ignorance and superstition were rife, a country refusing to fall into line with the forces of progress and modernization typical of Western Europe and Britain in particular. Spain was an unenlightened place hopelessly wrapped up in its own ‘black legend’.10 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, British culture largely envisioned Spain as a permanently fixed reality, one that had already been translated once and for all into the immutable patterns of an unchanging image. In particular, definitions of Spain as self-enclosed and incurious about neighbouring cultures fed into Enlightenment views of Spain as a world apart, unknown and not worth knowing. As a result, it appeared not just as an easily interpreted country forever captured in Cervantes’ and Lesage’s immortal narratives, but also as an opaque and ultimately unknowable territory. In 1761 Samuel Johnson wrote to Giuseppe Baretti, who had just returned to Italy from London via the Iberian Peninsula, ‘I wish you had staid longer in Spain, for no country is less known to the rest of Europe’.11 And a decade later, in 1776, another major source of Enlightenment dicta, Voltaire, described Spain as ‘a country of which we know no more than the most savage parts of Africa, and it is not worth the trouble of being known’.12 It should come as no surprise that such commonplace definitions of Spain featured repeatedly in travel accounts from this period, and especially in their exordia, as authors justified and celebrated the contributions of their volumes to an already vastly inflated portion of the international book market. For instance, the Italian friar Norberto Caimo, a Lombard from the Congregation of St Jerome, opened the first volume of his popular Lettere d’un vago italiano ad un suo amico (1761-8) by warning his readers that Spain was one of the least known countries in Europe; while his French translator, the Barnabite monk Timothée de Livoy, introduced a personal avertissement to confirm that, ‘Quoique le public soit en possession de plusieurs Voyages d’Espagne, aucun Voyageur ne l’ayant parcourue toute entiere, on ne peut en avoir qu’une idée imparfaite. Aussi n’y-t-il pas eu jusqu’ici de Carte exacte 10

11

12

See Henry Kamen, Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 136. On the leyenda negra see, for instance, William S. Maltby’s The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558-1660 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971). The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. by R. W. Chapman, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I, p. 135. ‘Voltaire’s British Visitors’, ed. by Sir Gavin de Beer and André-Michel Rousseau, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 49 (1967), p. 182.

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& complette de ce Royaume. L’un des plus puissans États de l’Europe, il est un des moins connus’.13 Also Baretti, in the prologue to his Journey from London to Genoa (1770), written at Dr Johnson’s particular request, declares that, among other things, the book aims to help his readers ‘form an idea tolerably just of Spain’; while in the very first letter he confesses to his brothers who are the recipients of his epistolary: ‘I know little of Portugal and less of Spain, as there are but very imperfect accounts of either’.14 A few years later, in his Nouveau voyage en Espagne, fait en 1777 & 1778, published simultaneously in London and Paris, Jean François Peyron dismissed a number of previous travel accounts (those by ‘Le pere Labat, Colmenar, Madame Dunois, M. de Silhouette, un Moine Lombard [Caimo], & M. Barreti’) as insufficiently reliable: ‘Quelques estimables & instructifs que soient tous ces Voyages, & deux ou trois autres encore [...] l’Espagne n’est pas bien connue encore, & je ne me flatte point de la faire entièrement connoître’.15 And Henry Swinburne, in his Travels through Spain, published by the London publisher of Peyron’s account, observed that ‘The travels through Spain that have appeared in print, are either old and obsolete, consequently in many respects unfit to convey a proper idea of its present state; or only relations of a passage through particular provinces, where the authors had neither time nor opportunity to procure much information’.16 His volume therefore aims to increase ‘the common stock of topographical knowledge; which of late years has been so prodigiously increased by accumulated imports from all parts of the globe’.17 As this comment makes plain, for Swinburne knowledge about other places is widely available in Britain in the works of national and foreign authors, yet there is no updated and reliable body of information about Spain, not even produced by Spaniards themselves. However close in geographical terms, Spain is paradoxically less well known than other, further-flung, corners of the world. An untranslatable geography, the Iberian country oscillates between the status of a place that resists being known and is thus not worth knowing (as in Voltaire’s statement), a lamentably little known part of Europe (as in Johnson’s words), or a country which is impossible to understand and cannot 13

14

15

16 17

[Norberto Caimo], Voyage d’Espagne, fait en l’année 1755, trans. Timothée de Livoy (Paris: J.P. Costard, 1772), p. v. A Journey from London to Genoa, through England, Portugal, Spain, and France, 3rd edn, 4 vols (London: T. Davies and L. Davies, 1770), I, pp. vi, 1-2. Nouveau voyage en Espagne, fait en 1777 & 1778 (Londres: P. Elmsly; Paris: Théophile Barrois, 1782), pp. 5-6, 11-12. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, p. iv. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, p. v.

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be known. In all these cases, since it cannot be fully and satisfactorily anatomized and explained, Spain evades contemporary patterns of cultural decoding and construction. Having been translated once and for all, it seems to challenge all further attempts at its reinterpretation and reconstruction.18

Mapping and Translating Spain In spite of the current trend for a resonantly metaphorical use of cartographic terms in literary criticism and cultural studies, ‘mapping’ and ‘charting’ are entirely apposite expressions in the case of cultural constructions of Spain between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the country was then untranslated also because it was still largely uncharted territory. There was very little cartography produced in Spain in the eighteenth century and, near the end of it, apart from the widely praised Atlas Marítimo de España (1789) by Vicente Tofiño de San Miguel, the only comprehensive work was Tomás López de Vargas Machuca’s Atlas de España (1792). Though flawed by several inaccuracies, this was the only available map of the entire country and provided the basis for the maps of Spain published by Chanlaire and Mentelle in France (1798) and John Stockdale in England (1808). Between the 1740s and 1808, official Spanish bodies launched a number of scientific projects in conjunction with foreign academies to establish a reliable general map of Spain, but all of these proposals came to nothing. Up to the outbreak of the Peninsular War, maps of Spain and Portugal were adapted or abridged versions of López de Vargas’s Atlas, and this lack of accurate maps effectively hampered both Sir John Moore and Arthur Wellesley in their military operations around the Peninsula.19 Unlike most other countries in Western Europe, Spain in 1808 was still an imperfectly transcribed geographical area. As a terrain without appropriate cartographic translation, it remained an opaque zone seemingly immune to the widespread tendency to 18

19

For a general, though rather sketchy, overview of British Hispanism, see J.C.J. Metford, British Contributions to Spanish and Spanish-American Studies (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950), translated into Spanish as La aportación británica a los estudios hispánicos e hispanoamericanos (Barcelona: Barna, 1952). On the lack of appropriate cartography for the British army during the war, see Ian Robertson, Wellington at War in the Peninsula 1808-1814: An Overview and Guide (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2000), pp. 22-25. See also Charles Esdaile, ‘La guerra y el gobierno: la intervención británica en España’, Revista de historia militar, 2 (2005), 79-98 (p. 93). More generally, see the excellent catalogue for the exhibition Madrid 1808: Guerra y territorio. Mapas y planos 1808-1814, Museo de Historia, Madrid, 25 April-15 September 2008 (Madrid: Museo de Historia, 2008).

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produce ever more accurate geographical records typical of the emphatically taxonomic discourse of Enlightenment science.20 If, on the one hand, the image of Spain as fixed and predictable clashed with that of the country as an unknowable territory, on the other, this macroscopic lack of mapping was not the entire picture. Attempts at filling the gaps of imprecise and partial information on the part of foreign commentators began to multiply in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially through a significant rise in the number of foreign travellers to Spain and the publication of their accounts.21 And, since travellers increasingly brought encyclopaedic and taxonomic approaches to bear on their descriptions of the Iberian country, publications such as the two-volume Travels through Spain, and Part of Portugal, with Commercial, Statistical, and Geographical Details (1808) became more and more common.22 As the growing availability of ‘sketches’, ‘observations’, ‘statistical travels’ and ‘characteristical views’ indicates, accounts of Spain published between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century present a distinctive tendency to deliver factually exhaustive inscriptions of it.23 Furthermore, such panoramic views are evidently marked by the travellers’ particular motivations for visiting Spain, a country that, unlike France and Italy, was seldom seen for pleasure. Thus, among the travellers that went to Spain before or during the Peninsular War, there were merchants and commercial agents such as William Jacob, Robert Semple or Sir John Bowring; professional travel writers such as Sir John Carr, and gentlemen of independent means such as Henry Swinburne and John Talbot Dillon, the latter a widely respected authority on Spain, its language and culture in mid- to late eighteenth-century England; informers such as Alexander Jardine, who first visited Spain in 1776 to gather 20

21

22

23

On eighteenth-century discourses and practices of cartography, see Matthew H. Edney, ‘Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map-Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive’, in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 165-98. Ana Clara Guerrero, Viajeros británicos en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Aguilar, 1990), p. 39. See also Mario Ford Bacigalupo, ‘An Ambiguous Image: English Travel Accounts of Spain 1750-1787’, Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, 1 (1978), 116-38, and Michael Crozier Shaw, ‘European Travellers and the Enlightenment Consensus on Spain in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, 31 (2008), 23-44. See, for instance, Henry Link’s Statistical Travels in Portugal, and through France and Spain, trans. by John Hinckley (1801) and Alexandre de Laborde’s A View of Spain (1809). Among relevant works in this category, see John Andrews’ Characteristical Views of the Past and of the Present State of the People of Spain and Italy (1808), William Bradford’s Sketches of the Country, Character, and Costume in Portugal and Spain (1809), Christopher Clarke’s An Examination of the Internal State of Spain (1818) and John Bowring’s Observations on the State of Religion and Literature in Spain (1819).

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intelligence and was then appointed consul to Galicia in 1791; politically motivated figures such as John Townsend, a friend of Jeremy Bentham’s, whose interests lay in political economy and the condition of the poor; and finally the scores of army officers who published their accounts during and after the Peninsular campaign. Bearing on the transcriptions of their Iberian experiences, the travellers’ agendas ensure an almost inexhaustible multiplicity of approaches to Spain. Taken collectively, their accounts set in motion a process of geocultural construction based on the imposition of external interpretative patterns, a process not unlike many contemporaneous acts of cultural colonization of the East and other non-European geographies.24 Yet they also, and less ominously, indicate that knowledge about Spain begins to be accumulated and organized, so that the opaque contours of the country and its culture gradually come into focus. Therefore, to go back to the language of mapping, we may say that British observers began to chart Spain in ways that sought to make up for the gaps, omissions and misleading simplifications of the past, and thus return it to the complexity of an intricate geocultural palimpsest. The Romantic (re)writing of Spain was then a writing of otherness, a ‘heterography’ that recognized, recovered, and reorganized a multiplicity of convergent differences. That Romantic-period culture should describe and inscribe Spain as a variety of interlocked (historical, social, political, economic, ethnic or linguistic) dimensions rests precisely on this many-sided operation of re(dis)covery and (re)construction. Its result was that Spain was effectively re-translated and reformulated into an updated geocultural archive. The ‘heterographic’ mechanisms implicit in the mapping and translating of Spain are especially palpable in the areas of history and historiography. No comprehensive and authoritative overview of Spanish history was published in Spain between the Jesuit Juan de Mariana’s Historiæ de rebus Hispaniæ libri XX published from 1592 onwards (and in Spanish from 1601 as Historia general de España) and Modesto Lafuente’s thirty-volume Historia general de España (1850-67).25 By contrast, in Britain and the United States the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the publication of groundbreaking research on some crucial periods of Spanish history, with such landmark studies as William Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), Robert Watson’s History of the Reign of Philip the Second 24

25

See, more generally, Elleke Boehmer’s introductory observations in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 14-15. See José Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2001), pp. 195-202.

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(1777), William Coxe’s Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon (1813), and William H. Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1838). The latter work appeared in Spanish translation in 1845 and, in Henry Kamen’s words, had an ‘important impact on Spaniards themselves, by affording them a carefully documented and fully comprehensive historical account which they had hitherto lacked’.26 These major works, moreover, were accompanied by a host of abridgments and overviews aimed at the general reading public, from such mnemonic tools as the Chronological Abridgment of the History of Spain in 32 cards (1809) to popularizing accounts as The History of Spain and Portugal from B.C. 1000 to A.D. 1813 published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1813.27 The fact that foreign scholars seemed to have an almost unchallenged monopoly over Spanish history well into the nineteenth century had inevitable consequences for the field of historiography in Spain.28 Thus, among Francisco Martínez de la Rosa’s principal sources for his Bosquejo histórico de la política de España (1855) were Watson’s Philip the Second, Coxe’s House of Bourbon, and Prescott’s Ferdinand and Isabella. And even before this book appeared, Antonio Alcalá Galiano had begun to translate Samuel Astley Dunham’s five-volume History of Spain and Portugal (183233) into Spanish. A friend of Robert Southey’s, Dunham had written his history of Spain for Dyonisius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and his account proved an immediate success, reaping universal praise as the best work on the topic, not least in George Ticknor’s authoritative History of Spanish Literature (1849).29 Beginning publication in 1844 as Historia de España desde los tiempos primitivos hasta la mayoría de la Reina Doña 26 27

28

29

Henry Kamen, Imagining Spain, p. 6. See, among others, Dennis Taaffe, Sketch of the Geography and of the History of Spain (1808), Alexander Beaumont, The History of Spain ... with a Geographical View of the Peninsula (1809), John Bigland, The History of Spain, from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Year 1809 (1810), and John Adams, History of Spain (1793, 1814). In addition, see the sizeable number of British studies on medieval history, and especially the Moorish occupation of Spain, for instance Stephen Weston’s Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages. With a Sketch ... of the History of Spain from the Invasion to the Expulsion of the Moors (1810), John Shakespear’s The History of the Mahometan Empire in Spain (1816), and Thomas Bourke’s A Concise History of the Moors in Spain (1811). On this aspect, see also David Howarth, The Invention of Spain: Cultural Relations between Britain and Spain 1770-1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 1-15 and 89-119. As Kamen has it, Galiano ‘was serious about giving the Spaniards their own history books, but, since they had none of their own, he translated and published [...] an English textbook’. Imagining Spain, p. 5.

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Isabel II, redactada y anotada con arreglo a la que escribió en inglés el Doctor Dunham, Galiano’s translation ultimately ran to seven volumes (1846) and was a publishing success and a highly regarded work that earned him an honorary membership of the Real Academia Española. Nonetheless, as the title makes clear, ‘translation’ is not the appropriate definition for Galiano’s operation. In fact, his Historia is more akin to an expansion and a recasting of Dunham’s narrative through the insertion of (duly signposted) additional passages and references to further sources which complement and, more often than not, correct Dunham’s observations. Thus, for instance, in the medieval section Galiano frequently takes the English historian to task for his excessive trust in Antonio Conde’s Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España (1820). In addition, he openly criticizes Dunham’s partial assessments, his ignorance of Spain owing to his short residence there, and his anti-Catholic prejudices and dim view of the Spanish historical trajectory. As the narrative approaches the present, Galiano’s corrections decrease and he relies less and less on Dunham, until his work becomes completely independent of the English source in its account of the recent decades. In this fashion, the Spanish version of Dunham’s History of Spain and Portugal attests to a gradual reappropriation of the narrative of the national past through a complex balancing act between foreign translations of one’s own culture and the need to retranslate them into the Spanish cultural dimension. Similar complexities attend the ‘translation’ of Spanish literary history. Eighteenth-century Spanish scholarship had produced a number of excellent works on national belles lettres, but, characteristically for this period, there had been no attempt at creating a comprehensive chronological narrative of this tradition. A case in point is the projected eleven-volume Historia literaria de España (1766-91) by the Franciscan brothers Rafael and Pedro Rodríguez Mohedano, which, excessively ambitious in scope and soon mired in disputes and controversies, did not progress beyond an account of the Latin literature produced in Spain during the first century BC and the era of Lucan.30 Of course, as literary histories were a by-product of Romantic historicism, that of Spain was not an isolated case at this point in time. Yet, significantly, when they began to appear in the early nineteenth century, the earliest histories of Spanish literature were written by foreign scholars, most notably Friedrich Bouterwek (as part of his twelve-volume Geschichte der

30

On literary historiography in eighteenth-century Spain, see José Cebrián, ‘Historia literaria’, in Historia literaria de España en el siglo XVIII, ed. by Francisco Aguilar Piñal (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1966), pp. 513-92.

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Poesie und Beredsamkeit, 1801-19), J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi with his De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813) and Ticknor’s three-volume History of Spanish Literature. In Britain, Robert Southey drew attention to the Spaniards’ lack of interest in mapping their own literary past that seemed to betray their inability to appreciate its monuments. If in his remarks on the Poem of the Cid in the Quarterly Review for 1814 he praised this epic as a masterpiece of Homeric proportions, he also disapprovingly observed that ‘The Spaniards have not yet discovered the high value of their metrical history of the Cid, as a poem’, adding that ‘they will never produce any thing great in the higher branches of the art till they have cast off the false taste which hinders them from perceiving it’.31 Southey, who owned a copy of Tomás Antonio Sánchez’s four-volume Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo XV (1779-90), the first of which contains the first modern edition of the Cantar de mio Cid, also provided an account of this poem in the preface to his Chronicle of the Cid (1808) complete with all the appropriate references to Sánchez’s work.32 In a similar vein, in the introduction to his Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic (1823), John Gibson Lockhart made the ‘Englishness’ of his project plain and explicit from the outset by presenting his work as primarily aimed ‘to furnish the English reader with some notion of that old Spanish minstrelsy, which has been preserved in the different Cancioneros and Romanceros of the sixteenth century’.33 Complaining that ‘No Spanish Percy, or Ellis, or Ritson, has arisen to perform what no one but a Spaniard can entertain the smallest hope of achieving’, that is providing a philologically and chronologically reliable edition for further investigations of the romances, Lockhart criticizes Spanish scholars for not having undertaken the recovery, editing and annotation of this crucial portion of their literary tradition.34 Albeit correct, Lockhart’s strictures are excessively severe. In point of fact, Spanish scholars had already started to reevaluate the romances in an effort to remove the stigma of a perverted literary form often associated with the lowest sort of people as voiced by such influential literati as Manuel 31 32

33

34

Review of ‘Chalmers’s English Poets’, Quarterly Review 12 (October 1814), 60-90 (p. 64). See nr 3198 (incorrectly printed as 3108) in the ‘Catalogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Portion of the Library of the Late Robert Southey Esq., LLD. Poet Laureate’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 178 (January-March 1943), p. 94, and Robert Southey, Chronicle of the Cid (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), pp. viii-ix. Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic, trans. by J. G. Lockhart (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1823), p. vii. Ancient Spanish Ballads, p. vii.

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María de Arjona, Juan Meléndez Valdés and José Gómez Hermosilla.35 Thus, between 1820 and 1823, the Valencian printer Agustín Laborda published a large number of romances, while Martínez de la Rosa defended them as expressions of the national poetry of Spain in his preponderantly neoclassical Poética (1827). In addition, the earliest germs of Agustín Durán’s definitive collection of ballads, his Romancero eventually published in five volumes between 1828 and 1832, dated back to the early 1820s. His project drew inspiration from foreign collections of romances, most notably Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber’s Floresta de rimas antiguas castellanas (1821-5), a work published in Hamburg and aimed at the German public, yet also well received in Spain and reviewed both in the Spanish press and the Londonbased Ocios de españoles emigrados in an article which, among other things, urged Spanish scholars to follow Faber’s example.36 And when the volumes of the Romancero eventually began to appear, they soon became immensely popular both in Spain and abroad, supplanting all previous foreign collections and editions.37 Considered in this wider context, Lockhart’s observation on the shortcomings of Spanish scholarship evidently begs the question of the cultural status of ‘differential developments’, as theorized by the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as their evaluation. If the Scottish scholar could find the belatedness of Spanish culture appealing because of its traditionalism and conservatism, it was not acceptable in terms of scientific and scholarly backwardness. In the nineteenth century, the writing of Spain’s literary history in the English-speaking world reached an unquestionable climax with Ticknor’s 1849 History of Spanish Literature. A mixture of scholarly accuracy, passionate tones and urbane argumentation, this truly monumental account relies on, and quotes extensively from, the entire repertoire of European scholarship on Spanish history and literature. The preface, in particular, traces a map of contemporary Hispanism by detailing the network of international contacts which grounds the entire project. Here, Ticknor mentions his friendship and learned exchanges with José Antonio Conde, Washington Irving, Obadiah Rich (a former American consul to Port Mahon in Minorca, then the London bookseller who supplied him with bibliographic materials), the Arabist and bibliophile Pascual de Gayangos, Lord Holland 35

36 37

See Edgar Allison Peers, A History of the Romantic Movement in Spain, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), I, pp. 157-8, and Jorge Urrutia’s introduction to Poesía española del siglo XIX (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995), p. 33. See Edgar Allison Peers, A History of the Romantic Movement in Spain, I, p. 94. See David T. Gies, Agustín Durán: A Biography and Literary Appreciation (London: Tamesis Books, 1975), p. 19.

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with his extensive library (Ticknor was a regular visitor at Holland House during his stays in London), and especially the help received from the historian William H. Prescott, one of his closest friends and, like him, a Harvard professor and a close friend of Gayangos. Even a quick glance at the sources Ticknor employs in the first volume (on early medieval literature) reveals that his literary-historical reconstruction draws on a rich archive of Spanish scholarship from the eighteenth century to the present. His notes contain references to, among others, Gregorio Mayáns y Síscar’s Orígenes de la lengua española (1737), the Paleographia española (1758), Mariana’s Historiæ de rebus Hispaniæ, Sánchez’s Colección de poesías castellanas, Antonio de Capmany’s Elocuencia española (1786), the Biblioteca española by Rodríguez de Castro (1781-6), the 1815 edition of the Fuero Juzgo by the Real Academia, Conde’s Historia and Gayangos’s History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1840-3). Ticknor’s abundant use of Spanish sources in his thickly referenced annotations continues through to the last volume, where he draws on studies on recent history and culture, among which are Martín Sarmiento’s Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas españoles (1775), J. J. López de Sedano’s Parnaso español (1768-78), Juan Sempere y Guarinos’s Biblioteca de los mejores escritores del reinado de Carlos III (1785-9), the Teatro nuevo español (1800-1) and Eugenio de Tapia’s Historia de la civilización española desde la invasión de los árabes hasta la época presente (1840). Ticknor’s re-elaboration and summation of this tradition resulted in an admirably updated and solid account of Spanish letters from their origins to present times, an account that was specifically informed by the intention to translate Spain, as is clear from the motivations animating this project. Among these were the fact that Spanish literature was relatively uncharted in its entirety, the desire to employ Spain as a kind of parable of the development and decline of national cultures, and finally the intention to write a literary history aimed both at specialists and at general readers, so that it might prove a useful lesson for everyone.38 In Spain, instead, a first wave of homegrown literary histories began to appear around the middle of the nineteenth century, and among them were those by Antonio Gil de Zárate and José Amador de los Ríos, published in 1844 and 1861 respectively and written partly in reaction to foreign accounts. The first, in particular, became a university textbook when it was made compulsory reading in the syllabuses

38

See David B. Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 136-42, and Thomas R. Hart, Jr., ‘George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature: The New England Background’, PMLA, 69 (1954), 76-88.

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established by Claudio Moyano’s 1857 Ley de Instrucción Pública.39 These publications, however, did not prevent Pascual de Gayangos from translating Ticknor’s work into Spanish (and improving it) with the assistance of Enrique de Vedia, in a four-volume edition published between 1851 and 1857. Therefore, alongside national ventures, foreign translations and systematizations of Spanish culture continued to operate within Spain, which consequently came to see itself through the images created by other national traditions, a process that was not unusual in the literature and culture of the Romantic period.40 This process received a particularly strong impulse by the mass emigration of liberal intellectuals to London after the failure of the constitutional monarchy at the end of the trienio liberal in 1823. As is well known, these figures played a crucial role as cultural mediators who, from the safe haven of Britain, wrote about Spain in English and Spanish, turning their country into a space of cultural and ideological intervention that falls within the scope of translation as this essay defines it. In London, the emigrados operated within a complex cultural network, a constellation of centres of Spanish culture that comprised Holland House, Rudolf Ackermann and his various publishing ventures, London-based periodicals such as the New Monthly Magazine and the Westminster Review, their own literary salons such as that of Agustín de Argüelles, and exiled booksellers and publishers such as Vicente Salvá and Marcelino Calero.41 Firmly centred on Spain, their cultural activities also targeted the Latin American public and cultural market, as the Iberian Peninsula was practically impenetrable during the absolutist backlash of 1823-33. Yet it was also in another sense that their cultural operations took two different, though interrelated, directions. On the one hand, they translated Spain for Britain, as in Joaquín Telésforo de Trueba y Cossío’s three-volume The Romance of History: Spain (1830) or José Joaquín de Mora’s three artículos de costumbres on ‘Spanish manners’ published in the European Review between 1824 and 1826.42 On the other hand, they translated British culture for Spanish-language readers, since, for instance, some of the émigrés were responsible for the earliest versions of 39

40

41

42

See José Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa, p. 240, and Miguel Ramos Corrada, La formación del concepto de historia de la literatura nacional española: las aportaciones de Pedro J. Pidal y Antonio Gil de Zárate (Oviedo: Departamento de filología española, 2000) and Leonardo Romero Tobar, La literatura en su historia (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2006). See my essay ‘“The True Essence of Romanticism”: Romantic Theories of Spain and the Question of Spanish Romanticism’, Tesserae: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 3 (1997), 127-45. See Vicente Llorens still essential study Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en Inglaterra (1823-1834) (México: El Colegio de México, 1954; Madrid: Castalia, 1968, 1979). See Vicente Llorens, Liberales y románticos, pp. 357-8.

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works by Lord Byron and Walter Scott (Trueba was the first to translate one of Byron’s poems, The Siege of Corinth, and the first Spanish versions of Ivanhoe and The Talisman were published by Ackermann in 1825), while Pablo de Mendibil published the two-volume Inglaterra, Escocia e Irlanda (1828), the translation of a geographical survey by Fredric Shoberl from Ackermann’s series ‘The World in Miniature’.43 Covering a variety of disciplines, from history to belles lettres and political economy, the activities of the liberal exiles, together with the work of British scholars, broadened the scope of the translation of Spain as a comprehensive operation of mapping, constructing, and interpreting the Iberian country and its cultures. Collectively, their works contributed to correcting the notion of Spain as an unknown and, in Voltaire’s dictum, uninteresting territory, and resulted in an impressive intensification of the efforts to investigate and reconstruct this cultural domain and an expanding number of publications which undoubtedly qualify the Romantic period as a turning point in the (re)translation of Spain into British culture.44 Furthermore, since this protracted and multifaceted operation was animated by, on the one hand, the exotic fascination of Spain, and, on the other, taxonomic and historicist tendencies, the translation of Spain effectively relied on a conceptual balance between what Nigel Leask has described as the ‘absorptive pull of the exotic image or allusion’ and the opposite ‘globalizing, descriptive discourse’ drawing on the Enlightenment’s ethnographic and taxonomic approach that assigns ‘a position of epistemological power’ to descriptive texts.45 Finally, this cumulative translation of Spain is evidently in keeping with the new awareness of the historical layering of cultural geographies originating from the notions of differential development and comparative contemporaneities bequeathed by Scottish Enlightenment conjectural historians to early nineteenth-century historicism.46 The Romantic-period rediscovery of the geocultural complexity of Spain finds its most conspicuous expression in the sizeable number of fictional 43 44

45

46

See Vicente Llorens, Liberales y románticos, p. 167. For evidence of the abundance of Spanish-themed publications in early nineteenth-century Britain, see José Alberich, Bibliografía Anglo-Hispánica 1801-1850 (Oxford: Dolphin Book Co., 1978). Alberich also lists translations of Spanish works and Spanish-language books published in Britain. ‘“Wandering through Eblis”: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 168. On Scottish Enlightenment historiographic notions in Romantic historicism, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 107, 127.

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reinventions of the Iberian country and its culture that, especially after the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808, started to flood the British literary market. Drawing on the knowledge produced by the scholarly translation of Spain, this ‘foreign’ corpus within the body of Romantic-period literature fully reflects the oscillations between exoticizing and taxonomic approaches as is manifest in the Spanish poems of Robert Southey and Felicia Hemans, undoubtedly the foremost British literary hispanophiles at the time. Indeed, the notes to Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814) design a complex intertext of Spanish sources that converge into a (re)construction of the Iberian country as an intricate network of cultures, languages, and stories ranging from the fall of the Visigothic kingdom to recent times and, specifically, the anti-Napoleonic conflict. Together, the poem and its annotations make plain how Romantic-period translations of Spain have transformed it from a two-dimensional reality caught up in an unchanging present into a full-blown, many-sided and contradictory, cultural geography. In addition, the cultural panoramas of Roderick, an expression of epic comprehensiveness based on ‘a comparative-culturalist logic’, find an intriguingly dissimilar counterpart in Hemans’ elaborations of Spanish materials and scholarly sources.47 Particularly, her production exemplifies a translation of Spain that resists the complete assimilation of the other literary tradition, as appears from the use of the Spanish epigraph from Cervantes’s Numancia in The Siege of Valencia (1823) or the articulated reference to Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada (a crucial work for her Spanish-Moorish imagination) in the headnote to The Abencerrage (1819) and the untranslated quotation from it in the notes to the second canto. Introducing other texts and voices into the poet’s canon, these references and untranslated excerpts emphasize the presence of another cultural layer within the poet’s translations of Spain, linking them to an original literary tradition that is progressively more thickly described and thus increasingly familiar to British culture. If, as initially suggested, Romantic-period translations of Spain often amount to a form of discursive colonization and occupation, by contrast Southey and Hemans make clear that these operations ultimately come to bear on English-language literature in significant ways. In the wider context of a literary field that, especially after 1815, presented multiple and diverse investments in Continental traditions, the works of these poets confirm that the Spanish archive provided British writers with formal and generic models, 47

Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 89.

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thematic materials, figures and myths associated with a specific cultural domain, yet also available for appropriation and adaptation. Perhaps there is no clearer sign of the successful accomplishment of Romantic-period translations of Spain than this incorporation of the Iberian country and its literary-cultural heritage into the cosmopolitan archive of contemporary fiction.

Translation as Intervention In 1812 the London firm of Longman & Co. published a Spanish-language edition of Antonio de Capmany’s Filosofía de la elocuencia. One of the fundamental works in eighteenth-century Spanish rhetorical theory, originally published in 1777, this was a revolutionary treatise deeply imbued with the author’s intellectual cosmopolitanism, desire for cultural innovation and hostility to traditionalist purism. Indeed, one particularly ground-breaking contribution of the essay in its first version was the promotion of an expansion and an enrichment of the Spanish language through the adoption of foreign lexis, especially French, in those areas of culture, science and technology for which Castilian lacked the appropriate terminology.48 By contrast, the second edition published in London retracts these positions in favour of an intransigently purist approach firmly opposed to French and its contaminating influences over the national qualities of Spanish. Appearing the year before Capmany’s death, this version of the essay attests to the antiFrench sentiments that had become widespread during the Peninsular conflict, as well as the radically mutated attitude of an intellectual who had become a patriot and a member of the Cortes of Cadiz which, in 1812, had voted the first (liberal) Constitution of the country. That such an intensely Spanish work should appear in London in a Spanish-language edition might seem a complete oddity, if we did not consider both the peculiar historical situation of Spain at the time and the cultural conditions arisen from the ongoing translation of Spain in the Romantic period. In point of fact, in 1812 the Iberian country was mired in one of the most difficult phases of the anti-Napoleonic conflict, and Cadiz, the capital of insurgent Spain as opposed to ‘José’ Bonaparte’s court at Madrid, was besieged by the French until August in the same year. Given the city’s isolation from the rest of Spain and its contingent links with Britain, it 48

See José Checa Beltrán, ‘Una retórica enciclopedista del siglo XVIII: la Filosofía de la elocuencia de Capmany’, Revista de literatura, 99 (1988), 61-89.

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would not have been too far-fetched for an established Spanish intellectual to look to the London-based publishing industry, one that was not only thriving compared to its Spanish counterpart but also ventured into the field of foreign-language publications. Indeed, this market-driven industry invested significantly in Spanish-language editions to be aimed at the vast and mostly untouched colonial and post-colonial South American countries. Finally, Capmany could rely on the presence of an active and well-connected intermediary in London, the émigré priest and intellectual José María Blanco White, who, thanks to his connections with Holland House and the London publishers, took care of the publication of the treatise. Accordingly, in August 1812, Capmany wrote to John Allen, Lord Holland’s adviser, to ask him to give White ‘un eterno reconocimiento por tan especial favor como ímprobo trabajo’.49 The publication of a landmark of eighteenth-century Spanish literature in London in 1812 testifies to the existence, by this date, of a well-established network of cultural links and intercultural exchanges between Spain and Britain. In addition, if that of Capmany’s essay was a ‘literal’ translation, that is the actual transportation of a manuscript from Cadiz to London, at the same time, the number and quality of actual translations from Spanish into English were steadily on the increase. As Anthony Pym and John Style confirm in their contribution to the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, versions of Iberian works into English took ‘Specific impetus […] from the cultural impact of the Peninsular wars of 1808-14’ and more particularly through ‘the influence of Robert Southey’.50 This momentum lasted well into the mid-century, when British Hispanism came of age and significant translations began to appear such as Thomas Roscoe’s threevolume collection of The Spanish Novelists (1832), that is authors of Italianstyle novelle, or Edward Churton’s versions of Luis de Góngora’s poetry in his two-volume Gongora: An Historical and Critical Essay ... with Translations (1862) inscribed to Robert Southey ‘the friend of Spain and Spanish literature’ and containing the first English translation of the Fábula de 49

50

Quoted in Fernando Durán López, José María Blanco White o la conciencia errante (Seville: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2005), p. 170. It is evident that, by this time, Capmany and Blanco White had put behind them the querelle between the Catalan intellectual and José Manuel Quintana, to whose literary group Blanco had been attached before his departure for England in February 1810. See Martin Murphy, Blanco White: SelfBanished Spaniard (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 41-2. Anthony Pym and John Style, ‘Spanish and Portuguese’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. by Peter France and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005-), IV: 1790-1900, ed. by Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (2006), p. 261.

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Polifemo y Galatea. Simultaneously, the wider-ranging process of translating Spain multiplied into a variety of forms of cultural mapping with such works as Quintana’s Lives of Celebrated Spaniards (1833) translated by T. R. Preston, Lardner’s three volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835-37) some of which were written by Mary Shelley, William Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula (1828-40) that superseded Southey’s earlier account, or Richard Ford’s two-volume Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain (1845), the ultimate guide to the country for the mid-century generations. This output collectively amounts to a monumental operation of inscription and translation of Spain, a complex work of transposition of one cultural system into another that is also a re-translation of previous geocultural constructs. If David Simpson has recently suggested that the cosmopolitanism of Romantic-period culture ‘is neither local/national nor international, but both at once’, such duality is particularly relevant to translation, an eminently ‘ambivalent medium’ endowed with a ‘profitable impossibility’ to be intended ‘not as the fantasy of dialogism but as the impasse of blocked communication’.51 This extended concept of translation comprises textual phenomena such as translations proper, imitations and adaptations, what Simpson calls the ‘encyclopaedic epic’ (such as Southey’s narrative poems) and other forms of hybridized texts. It also includes the ‘bearing across [of] human bodies’, such as the travellers and émigrés of Romantic-period Spain.52 It is within this composite range of possibilities that Spain emerges as a place of writing and translation, what may be called an ‘intervention zone’ where the metaphorics of place (geography in its rhetorical transfigurations) are relocated in a network of historical tensions, political, diplomatic and military operations, and cultural practices. If we consider intervention both as an act of cultural colonization and as a form of exchange and interaction, then the cultural phenomena examined in this essay become visible as the points of collision of diverse, but nonetheless converging, tendencies. These phenomena exemplify intervention in the sense of the introduction of an other culture into ‘our’ cultural schemes through appropriation and modification, as well as the (re)construction of the other culture through a variety of discursive and non-discursive operations. They also signify intervention intended as political, military and diplomatic action, as in the Holland House Whigs’ adoption of Spain as an object of

51

52

David Simpson, ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case for Translation’, European Romantic Review, 16 (2005), 141-152 (pp. 145, 147, 151). David Simpson, ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitanism’, p. 151.

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cultural and political reflection and activity, Jeremy Bentham’s indefatigable elaboration of constitutional models for the country and its colonies or excolonies, or radical reformers’ interest in the Spanish prison system with a view to its improvement. Intervention is then most explicit in the case of South America, as embedded in the ‘doctrine’ announced to Parliament on 12 December 1824 by George Canning, the then Foreign Secretary in Lord Liverpool’s Tory cabinet, when he declared: ‘Contemplating Spain, such as her ancestors had known her, I resolved that if France had Spain, it should not be Spain “WITH THE INDIES.” I CALLED THE NEW WORLD INTO EXISTENCE 53 TO REDRESS THE BALANCE OF THE OLD’. From yet another standpoint, intervention corresponds to a series of operations aiming to formulate or update knowledge about an other country and culture, so that it may (once again) resonate as a complex dimension within ‘our’ culture. In conjunction with the previous forms of intervention, this more constructive acceptation underlies the Romantic-period reinvention of Spain and its reformulation of the immutable image common until the late eighteenth century. As shown in this essay, the transformation of Spain into a zone of interrelated operations of exploration, translation and interpretation, glossing and clarification, description and mapping brings about a complete redefinition of its status in British culture. Yet this is also the facet of Romantic-period interventions that commentators have usually forgotten to examine or purposefully left aside. Spanish critics and historians have traditionally found fault with la imagen romántica de España, routinely accusing it of being as limited and limiting as previous views and assessments of their nation and culture. In their interpretations, the Romantics conceived Spain ‘como un país exótico y orientalizante, más pre-moderno que decadente’, generating ‘una imagen amable, pero negativa’ that ultimately defines Spain as the ‘other’ of Europe.54 Similarly, Carmelo Medina Casado and José Ruiz Mas have underlined how, in the early nineteenth century, ‘una Europa empapada de romanticismo se da por fin cuenta de que España es irrepetible’ and begins to fashion an abundance of representations of a country that, ‘por su atascamiento en el túnel del tiempo’, does not evolve, and therefore an

53

54

Quoted in Harold Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning 1822-1827 (London: Frank Cass, 1966 [1925]), p. 381. Javier Noya, La imagen de España en el exterior (Madrid: Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales, 2002), pp. 64-65, quoted in Imágenes de España en culturas y literaturas europeas (siglos XVI-XVII), ed. by José Manuel López de Abiada and Augusta López Bernasocchi (Madrid: Verbum, 2004), p. 58.

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irrepeatable experience becomes a cliché.55 Although occasionally well intentioned, Romantic interventions amount to a distortion of Spain and its culture that Fernando García de Cortázar does not hesitate to define as ‘preocupante’.56 Inevitably, moreover, the recent wave of theory and scholarship on issues of cultural imperialism has provided a ready-made set of concepts and terms that have regrettably occluded the subtler features of the cultural commerce between Romantic Europe and Spain. In this perspective, according to José Alvarez Junco, ‘en esa distribución de caracteres nacionales que hacía el romanticismo, España había quedado etiquetada como la representación del “exotismo” europeo; o, para ser más precisos, del “orientalismo”’.57 Nevertheless, there is more to Spain as a Romantic intervention zone than cultural colonization and imaginative imperialism. Since these assessments invariably see the country as the target of cultural interventions by more imaginatively powerful foreign traditions, they remain blind to the much wider, and much less colonizing, implications of the translation of Spain. In particular, they overlook the fact that these interventions set in motion forms of cultural exchange where Spain is at the receiving end of translations which it regularly incorporates into its own cultural developments. In the context of the British Romantic-period recovery and reinvention of the Iberian nation, interventions correct or replace previous images, anchor Spain to such fundamental principles of post-Enlightenment cultural construction as differential development and historicist perspectivism, and open up new spaces of cultural exchange such as translation and scholarly commentary. No longer an easily decoded unchanging object, Spain emerges as an entanglement of languages, peoples, stories and histories, fictions and places collectively caught in a complex chronologically layered structure. It is this picture of Spain that, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gradually comes into focus in British culture, that of a translatable cultural geography available for further investments and interventions.

55

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‘Introducción: viajeros e hispanistas, compañeros de ruta’, in El bisturi inglés: literatura de viajes e hispanismo en lengua inglesa, ed. by Carmelo Medina Casado y José Ruiz Mas (Universidad de Jaén, Servicio de Publicaciones: Jaén, 2004), pp. 22, 23. Fernando García de Cortázar, Los mitos de la historia de España (Barcelona: Planeta, 2005), p. 169. José Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa, p. 200.

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Bibliography Adams, John, The History of Spain, from the establishment of the colony of Gades by the Phoenicians, to the death of Ferdinand, surnamed the Sage (London: C. and G. Kearsley, 1793) Alberich, José, Bibliografía Anglo-Hispánica 1801-1850 (Oxford: Dolphin Book Co., 1978) Andrews, John, Characteristical Views of the Past and of the Present State of the People of Spain and Italy (London: C. Chapple, 1808) ‘An Officer in the Royal Navy’, A Trip to Spain: or, A True Description of the Comical Humours, Ridiculous Customs, and Foolish Laws, of that Lazy Improvident People the Spaniards (London: n. p., 1704-5) Bacigalupo, Mario Ford, ‘An Ambiguous Image: English Travel Accounts of Spain 1750-1787’, Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, 1 (1978), 116-38. Baretti, Giuseppe Marc’Antonio, A Journey from London to Genoa, through England, Portugal, Spain, and France, 3rd edn, 4 vols (London: T. Davies and L. Davies, 1770) Beaumont, Alexander, The History of Spain ... with a Geographical View of the Peninsula (London: S. A. and H. Oddy, 1809) de Beer, Sir Gavin, and André-Michel Rousseau, eds, ‘Voltaire’s British Visitors’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 49 (1967) Beltrán, José Checa, ‘Una retórica enciclopedista del siglo XVIII: la Filosofía de la elocuencia de Capmany’, Revista de literatura, 99 (1988), 61-89. Bigland, John, The History of Spain, from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Year 1809 (London: Longman & co; Doncaster: W. Sheardown, 1810) Black, Jeremy, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Alan Sutton; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) Bourke, Thomas, A Concise History of the Moors in Spain (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811) Bowring, John, Observations on the State of Religion and Literature in Spain (London: G. Smallfield, 1819) Bradford, William, Sketches of the Country, Character, and Costume in Portugal and Spain (London: Printed for J. Booth, by Howlett & Brimmer, 1809) Caimo, Norberto, Voyage d’Espagne, fait en l’année 1755, trans. Timothée de Livoy (Paris: J. P. Costard, 1772)

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Casado, Carmelo Medina, and José Ruiz Mas, eds, El bisturi inglés: literatura de viajes e hispanismo en lengua inglesa (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2004) Centlivre, Susanna, The Busybody, in Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, ed. by Melinda C. Finberg (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) Catalogue for the exhibition Madrid 1808: Guerra y territorio. Mapas y planos 1808-1814, Museo de Historia, Madrid, 25 April-15 September 2008 (Madrid: Museo de Historia, 2008) ‘Catalogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Portion of the Library of the Late Robert Southey Esq., LLD. Poet Laureate’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 178 (January-March 1943), 91-154. Cebrián, José, ‘Historia literaria’, in Historia literaria de España en el siglo XVIII, ed. by Francisco Aguilar Piñal (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1966), pp. 513-92 Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) Chapman, R. W., ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) Clarke, Christopher, An Examination of the Internal State of Spain (London: J. Hatchard, 1818) Corrada, Miguel Ramos, La formación del concepto de historia de la literatura nacional española: las aportaciones de Pedro J. Pidal y Antonio Gil de Zárate (Oviedo: Departamento de filología española, 2000) de Cortázar, Fernando García, Los mitos de la historia de España (Barcelona: Planeta, 2005) Dadon, Trevor J., ‘La imagen de España en Inglaterra en los siglos XVI y XVII’, in Imágenes de España en culturas y literaturas europeas (siglos XVI-XVII), ed. by José Manuel López de Abiada and Augusta López Bernasocchi (Madrid: Verbum, 2004), pp. 127-75. Duffy, Michael, The Englishman and the Foreigner (Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey, 1986) Edney, Matthew H., ‘Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and MapMaking: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive’, in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 165-98. Esdaile, Charles, ‘La guerra y el gobierno: la intervención británica en España’, Revista de historia militar, 2 (2005), 79-98.

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France, Peter and Stuart Gillespie, eds, The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005-) IV: 1790-1900, ed. Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (2006) Gies, David T., Agustín Durán: A Biography and Literary Appreciation (London: Tamesis Books, 1975) Guerrero, Ana Clara, Viajeros británicos en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Aguilar, 1990) Guillén, Claudio, Múltiples moradas: ensayo de literatura comparada (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998) Hart, Thomas R., Jr., ‘George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature: The New England Background’, PMLA, 69 (1954), 76-88. Howarth, David, The Invention of Spain: Cultural Relations between Britain and Spain 1770-1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) Junco, José Alvarez, Mater dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2001) Kamen, Henry, Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008 de Laborde, Alexandre, A View of Spain; comprising a descriptive itinerary of each province, and a general statistical account of the country (London: n.p., 1809) Leask, Nigel, ‘“Wandering through Eblis”; Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 164-88. Link, Henry F., Statistical Travels in Portugal, and through France and Spain, trans. by John Hinckley ([London]: Longman, Rees, 1801) Llorens, Vicente, Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en Inglaterra (1823-1834) (México: El Colegio de México, 1954; Madrid: Castalia, 1968, 1979) Lockhart, John Gibson, trans., Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1823) López, Fernando Durán, José María Blanco White o la conciencia errante (Seville: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2005) López de Abiada, José Manuel, ‘Spaniards’, in Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey, ed. by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 242-8 Maltby, William S., The Black Legend in England: The Development of AntiSpanish Sentiment, 1558-1660 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971)

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Metford, J. C. J., British Contributions to Spanish and Spanish-American Studies (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950); Spanish translation: La aportación británica a los estudios hispánicos e hispanoamericanos (Barcelona: Barna, 1952) Murphy, Martin, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989) Noya, Javier, La imagen de España en el exterior (Madrid: Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales, 2002) Peers, Edgar Allison, A History of the Romantic Movement in Spain, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) Peyron, Jean Francois, Nouveau voyage en Espagne, fait en 1777 & 1778 (Londres: P. Elmsly; Paris: Théophile Barrois, 1782) Robertson, Ian, Wellington at War in the Peninsula 1808-1814: An Overview and Guide (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2000) Rodríguez, Alicia Laspra, ‘El compromiso británico y la Guerra Peninsular: diplomacia, milicia y opinión pública’, Ciclo de conferencias ‘Bicentenario de la Guerra de la Independencia’ (Segovia: Asociación Cultural Biblioteca de Ciencia y Artillería, Academia de Historia y Arte de San Quirce, April 2008) ——, Las relaciones entre la Junta General del Principado de Asturias y el Reino Unido en la Guerra de la Independencia: Repertorio documental (Oviedo: Junta General del Principado de Asturias, 1999) Saglia, Diego, ‘“The True Essence of Romanticism”: Romantic Theories of Spain and the Question of Spanish Romanticism’, Tesserae: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 3 (1997), 127-45. Shakespear, John, The History of the Mahometan Empire in Spain (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1816) Shaw, Michael Crozier, ‘European Travellers and the Enlightenment Consensus on Spain in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, 31 (2008), 23-44. Simpson, David, ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case for Translation’, European Romantic Review, 16 (2005), 141-52. Southey, Robert, Letters Written during a Journey in Spain and a Short Residence in Portugal, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808) ——, Chronicle of the Cid (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808) Swinburne, Henry, Travels through Spain, in the years 1775 and 1776, in which several monuments of Roman and Moorish architecture are illustrated by accurate drawings taken on the spot (London: P. Elmsly, 1779)

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Taaffe, Dennis, Sketch of the Geography and of the History of Spain, with a succinct account of the causes of the late revolution. Translated from the French (Dublin: n.p., 1808) Temperley, Harold, The Foreign Policy of Canning 1822-1827 (London: Frank Cass, 1966 [1925]) Tobar, Leonardo Romero, La literatura en su historia (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2006) Tucker, Herbert, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) Tyack, David B., George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) Urrutia, Jorge, ed., ‘Introducción’, Poesía española del siglo XIX (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995) Weston, Stephen, Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages. With a Sketch ... of the History of Spain from the Invasion to the Expulsion of the Moors (London: n. p., 1810)

Joselyn M. Almeida

‘Esa gran nación, repartida en ambos mundos’: Transnational Authorship in London and Nation Building in Latin America In his influential Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson posits the rise of nationalism in Spanish America as a result of the ‘self-contained character’ of the virreinatos as ‘administrative political units’, citing the relative ‘difficulty of communications’ as a factor that prevented a union of these territories similar to the United States.1 Yet in its conception, the independence of Latin America was a transnational phenomenon, given that a significant portion of its intellectual class had been exiled to Italy, and another had established itself in London. This essay analyzes how the confluence of Spanish and Spanish American intellectuals in England between 1790 and 1814 resulted in a transnational conception of the nationalist project of independence for the New World as a continent. My reading examines Francisco de Miranda’s Creole and British networks, which contributed to the dissemination of Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán’s Carta a los españoles americanos, and also the journal El Colombiano, which Miranda founded to cover the Napoleonic crisis for Spanish American readers and advance americanismo as an index of national consciousness. At the same time, José Blanco White advocated the equality of ‘españoles americanos’ and ‘españoles europeos’ in his widely read El Español in order to preserve the unity of what he envisioned as a transterritorial nation. This mediating stance contained an unintended radicalism, since Blanco took issue with the racialized hierarchies that were a hallmark of societies in the Americas. Miranda’s and Blanco White’s writings in this period show that the national imaginary can be negotiated across transnational borders.

In ushering the movements that sparked revolutions throughout the Atlantic world, Romanticism dramatically reoriented the imperial histories of England and Spain. The narrative of rivalry between the two powers, one that drew life from a shared cultural unconscious haunted by tragic queens, pirate heroes, and the all too conscious opposition between Catholic and Protestant, receded before the tide of revolution in two continents. While unruly American scenarios called into question the narratives of colonization and right to empire that shaped state formation for both nations, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 turned longstanding rivals into allies.2 Yet even 1

2

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 48. ‘[European] colonial expansion into the Americas reinvigorated a notion of universal monarchy. The latter was a cultural vessel for the memorialization of Rome [...] English understanding of colonial settlement furnished leading adventurers with a paradigm of civilizing to follow and experiment with [...] Spain came to be identified as an actual

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before the Anglo-Iberian stance against French power, the popularity of works such as William Robertson’s History of America (1787) and Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) exposed just how entangled were the national imaginaries of England and Spain. Sheridan’s play, as Diego Saglia suggests, epitomizes the figuration of Britain’s national concerns refracted in Spain’s plot of conquest. ‘Pizarro’s popular mythology of military and cultural opposition confirmed Spain as a textual site capable of allegorizing the tensions of the revolutionary period by a means of inherited patterns of national identification’.3 Saglia’s pioneering study masterfully demonstrates how British interest in Spain was pervasive, sustained, and went far beyond Lord Byron’s Don Juan, which until recently has represented Romanticism’s investment in all things Hispanic in cultural histories of the period. 4 What is not as evident in the current critical literature is that Britain’s interest in Spain had as much to do with the fate of Spain’s territories in the American hemisphere as it did with concerns about the geopolitical repercussions of French control over the Iberian Peninsula and the fate of European revolutionary ideals.5 As early as 1790, Britain began to take an interest in South America through the efforts of Francisco Miranda, the indefatigable promoter of Latin American independence. He had arrived in London after years of travel had taken him from his native Caracas to Cuba, across the revolutionary United States, to Europe as far as the court of

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monarchia universalis by some in the Spanish court’. See Jeremy Smith, Europe and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism, and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 97-98. Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 43-44. Besides Saglia, see also Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) For recent reassessment of Romantic era writers and Latin America, see Alan Richardson, ‘Epic Ambivalence: Imperial Politics and Romantic Deflection in William’s Peru and Landor’s Gebir,’ in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), pp. 265-82; Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Joselyn M. Almeida, ‘Conquest and Slavery in Robert Southey’s Madoc and James Montgomery’s The West Indies’, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. by Lynda Pratt (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 151-166; Nigel Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America’, Pratt, Southey, 133-150. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, ‘Thy World Columbus Shall Be Free’: British Romantic Deviance and Spanish American Revolution’, European Romantic Review (2006): 151-159; Jessica Damián, ‘Helen Maria Williams’ Personal Narrative of Travels from Peru to Peruvian Tales,’ Nineteenth Century Gender Studies (2007) .

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Catherine the Great, where he was a favorite of the Russian potentate.6 Through his connections, Miranda obtained a hearing with William Pitt when he arrived in London in 1790, and after their first meeting, boldly proposed: South America requests, that England would assist her to shake off the infamous oppression in which Spain keeps her [...] South America might by herself execute the mentioned expulsion [...] but considering the extension of that Continent & the great distances from one capital to another — Considering that there are no roads to communicate by land, being necessary to go by sea from one province to another — and what is more yet, that there is not in all the Spanish Dominions on that hemisphere a single newspaper as a medium of communication between one province and another; — the impossibility of acting unanimously [is very obvious] & of course the necessity of having a maritime force that might preserve the communication open, & resist those that Spain might sent to obstruct the design. No power can do this with greater facility than England.7

While Miranda’s proposal caught Pitt’s interest, this first round of negotiations disintegrated after Britain and Spain resolved their differences over trading and settlement rights in Canada’s Nootka Sound.8 Miranda then left for France, where he served as a general in the French Revolution on the condition that he be the one to command operations in Latin America should the French decide to liberate it.9 His association with Charles Dumouriez’s invasion of Holland earned him the wrong kind of notoriety, though, and after surviving imprisonment by Robespierre and ongoing political harassment, he returned to Britain and resumed negotiations with Pitt in 1798. He continued to request British support throughout his residence in London, which lasted until 1810, when he returned to Venezuela a second time (his first attempt had ended in a military fiasco).10 6

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For more on Miranda’s relationship with Catherine the Great see Karen Racine, ‘Love in the Time of Revolution: Francisco de Miranda’s Relationships with Women’, in Francisco de Miranda: Exile and Enlightenment, ed by. John Maher (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2006). Francisco Miranda, ‘Proposal in Consequence of the Conference at Hollwood the 14th of February, 1790’, in Archivo del General Miranda, ed. by Vicente Dávila, 24 vols (Caracas: Editorial Sur-Americana, 1929-50), XV, pp. 111-113. Hereafter cited as Archivo. The dispute, largely forgotten today, was serious enough at the time to nearly lead to war. Francisco Miranda, ‘Relación de Miranda a Mr Servant Ministro de la Guerra. August 1792,’ Archivo, XII, p. 8. Miranda attempted a landing in Venezuela in 1806, but was rebuffed by the Spanish, who captured most of his U.S. volunteers. These men were tried and ten were sentenced to death. See John H. Sherman, A General Account of Miranda’s Expedition: Including the Trial and Execution of Ten of his Officers, and an Account of the Imprisonment and Sufferings of the Remainder of His Officers Who Were Taken Prisoners (New York: McFarlane and Long, 1808).

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Even at Miranda’s lowest point after the failure of 1806, he was not alone in making the case for British assistance for the independence of South America. Calls for British involvement would come from quarters as diverse as Henry Brougham, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, and from a community of Spanish and Latin American émigrés such as José María Blanco White and Andrés Bello. Miranda, Blanco White, Bello and their circles have been read in terms of the experience of exile, yet new research invites us to think of the Hispanophone community in London as a collective that shaped global patterns of cultural activity at the beginning of the nineteenth century.11 Using Thomas Faist’s definition of transnational social spaces, this essay argues that Spanish and Spanish American writers, émigrés, and exiles constructed a transnational social space that amplified the public spheres of Spain and Latin America. This transnational sphere addressed the problem of not having ‘a single newspaper as a medium of communication between one province and another’ that Miranda had identified to Pitt, and that Benedict Anderson has singled out as the main difference between North and South America. Miranda’s dissemination of Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán’s Carta a los españoles americanos, his collaboration with James Mill, the journal El Colombiano, and José Blanco White’s El Español anticipated the cultural traffic between England and Latin America, and cultivated audiences for Rudolph Ackermann’s and Andrés Bello’s transcontinental publications.12 Miranda and Blanco demonstrate moreover that the discursive construct of the national imaginary is not categorically bound to geography by writing from outside the boundaries of the state and its administrative divisions. Their negotiation of distance through print media, and their crossing of geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries signals Romanticism’s transnational dimension, one that extends Anderson’s classic definition of the nation as a shared imaginary

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Vicente Llorens, Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en inglaterra (México: Colegio de México, 1952) remains the classic account of this community. See also Karen Racine, ‘Imagining Independence: London’s Spanish American Community 1790-1829’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Tulane University, 1996); La república peregrina: hombres de armas y letras en América del Sur, 1800-1884, ed. by Carmen McEvoy and Ana María Stuven (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2007). See John Ford, ‘Rudolph Ackermann: Publisher to Latin America’, in Bello y Londres: Segundo Congreso del Bicentenario, ed. by Oscar Sambrano, Rafael Caldera, and Pedro Grases, 2 vols (Caracas: Fundación La Casa de Bello, 1980), I, pp. 197-224. See also Nanora Sweet, ‘Hitherto Closed to British Enterprise: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World Circa 1815’, European Romantic Review 8 (1997), 193-147.

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that depended on the joint circulation of print and burgeoning commerce through an easily connected geography. 13 British interest in Latin America has been largely characterized as financial, given that the profits and losses of the first waves of speculative loans from Britain to Latin America serve as a prototype of the boom and bust bubbles that have become an all too familiar scenario in Western capitalism.14 Cultural capital has been read as a byproduct of trade, yet transnational theory suggests that the trade in cultural capital set the stage for finance capital. Faist defines transnational social space as one of process and ‘not static notions of ties and positions,’ a description that maps the contours of the Hispanophone community in London. They inhabited a historical moment when the Napoleonic invasion caused instability along the boundaries of Spain itself, and the status of its American colonies came into question. Faist explains that in transnational space ‘the various forms of social capital provide transmission belts that link groups and networks in separate nation states [...] to employ their human capital such as vocational skills and educational degrees in the immigration country’.15 The concrete interests that Britain had in the outcomes of both Spain and Latin America facilitated the émigrés’ integration as quasi-official agents who could regulate the strategic circulation of cultural and symbolic capital between England, Spain, and the Americas; London’s status as the most cosmopolitan city of its time undoubtedly contributed to the effective functioning of this network. The Anglo-Hispanic community in London also envisioned trade in culture as part of the stake that it had in the incipient republics. Rudolph Ackermann’s extraordinary publishing venture, the foremost example of this transnational cultural engagement, would have been impossible without the contributions and labor of the Spanish and Spanish Americans who either translated or wrote over 100 titles in Spanish for Latin American consumption in the 1820s.16 Highlights in Ackermann’s catalogue include Blanco White’s journal Variedades, which José Joaquín de Mora 13 14

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 63. Mining, business, and financial ventures led to what Mary Louise Pratt has called the ‘capitalist vanguard’. The spread of investment fever was not limited to the British interest alone, as it was often encouraged by South American elites. See Ignacio Nuñez, An Account, Historical, Political, and Statistical of the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata (London: R. Ackermann, 1825) for an example of the financial prospectuses and narratives encouraging British immigration to South America that criollos authored. Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 201. See Eugenia Roldán Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge in Transcontinental Perspective (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2003), p. 29.

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continued as El correo de Londres, and Mora’s poems to William Blake’s engravings for The Grave.17 Yet the most popular of Ackermann’s publications were textbooks in catechistic form, which delivered content in a form designed to implement Joseph Lancaster’s educational system of mutual learning, and to encourage independent reading in a population assumed to be largely illiterate. ‘Indeed, the countries that prescribed by law the use of Ackermann’s catechisms in primary or secondary schools, like Gran Colombia and Bolivia, also prescribed the use of the monitorial system for their teaching’.18 Eugenia Rodán Vera has examined the imperialistic overtones of the project; at the same time, the idea of using resources in London to publish for Latin America inspired creoles to publish their own journals. The Biblioteca Americana and the Repertorio Americano, published in the 1820s, were more modest in scale, but have been considered landmark publications in Latin American literary and cultural history.19 Andrés Bello, who edited the two periodicals and authored the foundational Silvas Americanas [American Eclogues], wrote to the readers of the Repertorio that ‘London is not only the metropolis of trade; in no part of the globe are the causes that vivify and nourish the human spirit as they are in Great Britain. Nowhere are the researches bolder, the flight of genius freer, scientific speculation more profound, experiments in the arts more spirited’.20 For Bello, the publication of the Repertorio in London established a gateway for the republics to enter into the cultural boon of the Romantic period, which was just as important as securing commerce in ‘the metropolis of trade’. Miranda understood the need for ‘social and symbolic ties [...] necessary to mobilize economic and human capital,’ and had cultivated such connections throughout his twenty years spent between Britain and France.21 Karen Racine observes that ‘Miranda remained a man caught between two worlds,’ a state that in her view presented a liability for him, especially when

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20

21

For a discussion of Mora’s Meditaciones poéticas, see Robert Blair’s The Grave, Illustrated by William Blake: a Study with Facsimile, ed. by Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley (London: Scolar Press, 1982). For a discussion of Blanco White’s Variedades, see Martin Murphy, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Joselyn M. Almeida, ‘Blanco White and the Making of Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism’, European Romantic Review, 17 (2006), 437-456. Roldán Vera, p. 147 See Pedro Grases, Tres empresas periodísticas de Andres Bello: Bibliografía de la Biblioteca Americana y el Repertorio Americano (Caracas: 1955). Andrés Bello, ‘El Repertorio Americano’, Selected Writings of Andrés Bello, ed. by Iván Jaksic, trans. by Frances M. López-Morrillas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 4. Faist, p. 201.

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he returned to Venezuela in 1810.22 Yet in terms of transnational agency, Miranda was as well connected in both Europe and America as only a few could be; Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin come to mind by way of comparison. From Caracas, Miranda received letters from Juan Vicente Bolívar, Simón Bolívar’s father, and visits from friends and collaborators such as Pedro Caro and Juan Manuel de Cajigal, who kept him abreast of developments in the Caribbean and the United States. In his travels through the United States, he met Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, with whom he later corresponded, and Col. William Smith, Adams’ son in law, traveled with him through Amsterdam, Prussia, and Vienna.23 After his return to London in 1798 following years in Paris, he associated politically with Nicholas Vansittart, Sir Evan Nepean, Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Home Popham, and befriended Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, who assisted Miranda in using the Edinburgh Review to advance the Latin American cause. Miranda’s friendship with Mill went so far as to enter into discussions of religious belief.24 As for Bentham, he considered following Miranda to South America after he gave up his earlier project of going to Mexico. ‘If I go thither [to Caracas], it will be to do a little business in the way of my trade — to draw up a body of laws for the people there, they having [...] taken advantage of the time, and shaken off the Spanish yoke, which was a very oppressive one’.25 Miranda’s apartment on Grafton Street, where he housed a formidable library, has long been acknowledged as a headquarters of the Latin American independence movement, and a meeting point for Spanish and Portuguese exiles in the first decade of the 22

23

24

25

This turn in Racine’s biography anticipates a bleak conclusion, which focuses on Miranda’s isolated demise. Miranda’s cosmopolitanism, otherwise celebrated in Racine’s argument, finds its counterpart in the equalizing territory of death. ‘He had fought gloriously for liberty wherever he went and had been jailed more than once for his convictions, but when death finally came knocking, Miranda found himself to be just the same as everyone else — alone.’ See Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda: a Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington: SR Books, 2003), p. 255. He also met Thomas Pownall, former governor of Massachusetts, who introduced him to Pitt in London, and proved to be a faithful friend and supporter for years. ‘In Mill’s own family, there is a vague tradition that his breaking with the church and religion followed his introduction to Bentham. Strange to say, the most authentic fact that I have been able to procure is, that the instrument of his final transformation was General Miranda. Unfortunately we have nothing but the bare fact; it was stated by Mill himself to Walter Coulson, one of his intimate friends of later years, but the circumstances have been withheld.’ See Alexander Bain, James Mill: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1882), p. 89. Jeremy Bentham, ‘To John Mulford. 1 November 1810.’ The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Correspondence, ed. by Stephen Conway, 21 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) VIII, p. 77.

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1800s.26 Blanco and Bello, whose friendship resulted in Blanco’s recommendation of Bello for the tutorship of Lord Holland’s children, met at a dinner that Miranda hosted to fete the departing Simón Bolívar.27 Blanco White also had far reaching connections in Spain, England, and the Americas. Before leaving Spain in 1808, his literary circle included the scholars and poets Manuel Quintana and Alberto Lista, to whom he dedicated the Cartas de Inglaterra, and Manuel de Godoy, the Prince of the Peace.28 In England, he was an intimate of Lord Holland, and knew most of the leading Romantic writers and figures of his time, including S. T. Coleridge, Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans, and William Wilberforce, to whom Blanco proposed starting a Spanish Protestant church in Trinidad.29 Besides Andrés Bello, Blanco met and corresponded with Simón Bolívar, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, and Luis López Méndez. The combined efforts of Miranda, Blanco and their circles in London matched in scope and activity the cohort of Jesuits whom Charles III had exiled to Italy. These included the historian Francisco Clavijero, author of the Historia Antigua de México (1780), Juan Ignacio Molina, author of Compendio de la historia geográfica, natural, y civil del reyno de Chile (1787), and the intellectual Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán.30 These networks facilitated the creation of a transnational social space where the conjunction of Spaniards and Spanish Americans enabled the mapping of a continental imaginary that translated the divisions of the Spanish empire, the virreinatos of Nueva España, Nueva Granada, Peru, and the Río de la Plata into a vast political unit. The overlapping imaginaries of América as continent and as national space draw on pluri-local frames of reference, and early articulators of independence projected the enterprise for South America as a continent as well as for the proto-national spaces within it.31 This imaginary laid the foundation that Bolívar would later invoke in the 26

27 28 29

30

31

See William Robertson, The Life of Miranda, 2 vols (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), II, pp. 58-59. See also Racine, Francisco Miranda, p. 155. André Pons, Blanco White y América (Universidad de Oviedo: 2006), p. 40. Murphy, p. 34. José Blanco White, The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White: Written by Himself, ed. by John Hamilton Thom, 3 vols (London: J. Chapman, 1845), I, p. 316. For a discussion of Clavijero, Molina, and other Spanish American Jesuits, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How To Write a History of the New World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) pp. 234-260. See Ludger Pries, ‘The Approach of Transnational Social Spaces: Responding to New Configurations of the Social and the Spatial’. New Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Twenty- First Century (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 3-36. Pries defines the pluri-local as ‘frameworks composed of material artifacts, the social practices of every day life, as well as systems of symbolic representation that are structured

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‘Carta de Jamaica’, in which he refers to the ‘Nuevo Mundo’ as ‘este país’, and ponders the ‘idea grandiosa pretender formar de todo el Mundo Nuevo una sola nación’.32 The interplay between continental and local imaginaries is evident as early as Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán’s Lettre aux espagnolsaméricains, written at the apogee of the revolution in France. Viscardo was among the exiled Jesuits, and went to London in 1796 at the urging of Sir Horace Mann, who gave him a letter of introduction to Charles James Fox, uncle to the future Lord Holland.33 During his time in London, Viscardo y Guzmán corresponded with Mann and other officials about British assistance for a revolution in Spanish America. After Viscardo’s death in 1798, Miranda received the Jesuit’s papers, and lost no time editing and circulating the Lettre in London, the United States, and Latin America in French, Spanish, and English.34 He first had it published in 1799 with the help of Rufus King, the U.S. Ambassador, and sent it to Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Picton, Governor of Trinidad, and Pedro Caro and Manuel Gual who were in Trinidad as well, and then continued to Caracas. 35 In 1801, Miranda himself translated and published it in Spanish, and disseminated it from London; despite being censored in Spanish territories, it was read from Mexico to Buenos Aires.36 Viscardo y Guzmán opens the letter declaring ‘El nuevo mundo es nuestra patria, su historia es la nuestra, y en ella es que debemos examinar nuestra situación presente’ (The new world is our country, its history is our history, and in it we must examine our present situation). He claims the entirety of the new world as the ‘patria’ or country of ‘18 millones de hombres’ (18 million American men). If Viscardo gives the dimension of a vast continent to the homeland of americanos, he takes a long view of the history of the Spanish empire in the Americas to call for a break in the

32

33

34

35

36

by and structure human life. So the argument is that there are “social facts” (as defined by Emile Durkheim), “interlacing networks” (in Anthony Giddens’ terms) that transcend, in a socially relevant manner, the unit of analysis set by nation states and national societies and at the same time are real pluri-local social practices, artifacts and symbols’. p. 6. Simón Bolívar, ‘Carta de Jamaica’, in Simón Bolívar: Escritos Políticos, ed. by Graciela Soriano (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990), pp. 69, 81. Hereafter cited as ‘Carta de Jamaica’. Gustavo Vergara Arias, Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán (Lima: Universidad Nacional de Perú, 1963) p. 51. Cited as Vergara Arias. For an account of Miranda’s edits in the manuscript, see Merle E. Simmons, Los escritos de Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán (Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 1983). Racine explains ‘Rufus King paid the printer and Viscardo’s Lettre aux espagnol’s americains appeared in London in 1799 bearing a false Philadelphia imprint to avoid antagonizing Pitt’. Francisco Miranda, p. 147. Also see Vergara Arias, pp. 100-101. Vergara Arias, pp. 101-111.

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imperial chronological continuum, one that would equal the narrative disruption in world history that the incursion of the Spanish caused in the new world. ‘Nosotros estamos obligados a llenar, con todas nuestras fuerzas, las esperanzas de que hasta aquí el genero humano está privado. Descubramos otra vez de nuevo la América para todos nuestros hermanos, los habitantes de este globo’ (We have the obligation to fill, with all our strength, the hopes of which humanity is deprived. Let us rediscover America once more for all our brothers, the inhabitants of this world).37 Viscardo’s injunction to americanos proleptically performs this second ‘discovery,’ since the Carta uncovers the parallel history of the imperial legacy, one that can be summarized ‘en estas cuatro palabras: ingratitud, injusticia, servidumbre, y desolación’ (in these four words: ingratitude, injustice, enslavement, and desolation). The history of injustice, one concurrent with Spain’s imperial narrative, necessitates armed struggle throughout the continent to redress the ‘usurpación’ of the rights and property of americanos.38 Viscardo elaborates the seizure and murder of the first Túpac Amaru, who had legitimate claims to the throne of Perú, as an event that re-presents how Spain criminally deprived criollos of their individual rights under natural law and their corresponding property rights. Besides detailing the capture of the Incan heir, Viscardo shows how the Spanish Viceroy rounded up and incarcerated mestizos under twenty years of age with the intent of executing them on the mere suspicion of the young men’s support of Túpac. The pleas of a mother change the viceroy’s mind, and he instead exiles the young men. Viscardo unambigously suggests, however, that the total dispossession of the mestizos’ rights as subjects of the crown and of their property, which was divided between the viceroy and his supporters, amount to a social death that calls into question the legitimacy of the government’s exercise of its laws. The figure of Túpac Amaru also evokes the second Túpac Amaru, who organized and led an insurrection of 30,000 men against the Spanish in 1780, and whose revolt was known throughout the Americas and Europe. His story circulated through the popular press, literature, and unofficial channels. The Weekly Miscellany and other journals publicized ‘the insurrection in South America,’ Helen Maria Williams famously alludes to it in her epic Peru, and Miranda gave Pitt an account of Túpac Amaru’s insurrection.39 None were as detailed, however, as Viscardo’s account. In another essay on South 37

38 39

Viscardo y Guzmán, ‘Carta dirijida a los españoles americanos’, in Vergara Arias, pp. 150, 160. Ibid., pp. 149-50. Miranda, ‘Propuesta’, Archivo, XV, pp. 114-118.

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American independence, Viscardo narrates how Areche, Túpac Amaru’s captor, forced the Inca’s wife and son to watch as he had Amaru’s tongue cut out and then ordered the leader of the rebellion to be drawn and quartered by horses.40 This invocation of the second Túpac Amaru through the naming of the first in the Carta enacts the repetitive uncanniness of the ‘truth event’. Ian Baucom reflects: The spectral quality of the truth event [...] pertains to its uncanny and reiterative temporality. For the event, like the specter, is an untimely apparition: untimely in the sense that it first appears as the reapparition of itself, emerges into visibility (as an event) not at the moment of its happening but only within the retrospective purview of what Zizek calls its subjects — those who, having made a decision for the truth of the event, belatedly call it into being (as one) by naming it as such and naming themselves as those who are faithful to the truth they discern in it.41

For Viscardo, the twin ‘specters’ of Túpac Amaru I and II signify the truth of americanos at the end of three hundred years of Spanish rule. In the reiteration of the Túpac Amaru stories, Viscardo becomes a ‘subject’ who names and enjoins others to also ‘call into being’ the necessity for independence in light of the fact that americanos cannot exercise rights granted by natural law, such as the right to self-defense and to own property, and that the assertion of those rights results in brutal repression by the state. Viscardo furthermore links the violation of individuals to the transfer of the wealth and the human and natural resources of the American continent to Europe. The exiled mestizos, deprived of their property, foreshadow the exile of the Jesuits to Italy, who are also stripped of their rights and holdings. The arbitrariness of the state in dealing with the Jesuits, like the viceroys’ punishments of both Túpacs, reveals that the colonial government ‘está habituado a considerar nuestra propiedad como un bien que le pertenece, todo su estudio consiste en aumentarle con detrimento nuestro, coloreando siempre, con el nombre de utilidad de la madre patria, el infame sacrificio de todos nuestros derechos y de nuestros más preciados intereses’ (is in the habit of considering our property as a good that belongs to it; all its strategy consists in increasing it to our disadvantage by covering the infamous sacrifices of our rights and closest interests in the name of the good of the mother country).42

40 41

42

Viscardo, ‘Suite Essai,’ in Simmons, p. 195. See Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp.120-21. Viscardo, ‘Carta dirijida a los españoles americanos’, in Vergara Arias, p. 157.

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Viscardo’s transnational experience of exile thus underwrites the national imaginary that he proposes to americanos as an alternative to the Spanish government. Colonial administration effects the ultimate dispossession of individual natural rights, property, and a person’s place in the world. From the errantry of exile, he inscribes the identity of américanos into the plurilocal frames of the American continent and their autochthonous locales. These alternating frames allow him to present both the first and second Túpac Amaru as an iteration of the natural rights to freedom and property of which americanos have been deprived, and the truth of necessary insurrection. Moreover, they open a space through which the geographical distance between Spain and the Americas can be redefined so as to validate the sovereignty of the local. ‘La naturaleza nos ha separado de España con mares inmensos. Un hijo que se hallaría a semejante distancia de su padre [...] está emancipado por el derecho natural; y en igual caso, un pueblo numeroso, que nada depende de otro pueblo [...] ¿deberá estar sujeto como un vil esclavo?’ (Nature has divided us from Spain by immense seas. A son who finds himself at a similar distance from his father [...] is emancipated by natural right; and similarly, a numerous 43 people, who do not depend on others [...] must they be subjugated like a vile slave?)

Exile becomes a template to imagine a reverse denaturalization, one in which the natural rights of the son override filial or statist authority. Like the son separated ‘by immense seas’ from his father, Viscardo and the other Jesuits are separated from their native land. The authority of the father or the law, however, cannot reach either the exile or the ‘numerous people’ who find themselves ‘emancipated by natural right’. Distance invalidates the authority of the state because it cannot protect local interests, just as the father cannot protect his son. Viscardo suggests that the natural right to freedom supersedes filial models of authority and rests in popular sovereignty, and translates the continental spatiality of the new world into a national imaginary in need of self-government. This vision would resonate with Miranda, who, independently of Viscardo, had also articulated the location of la patria in terms of the continent of América. As he stressed to Pitt in 1791, all his efforts were towards ‘the happiness and prosperity of South America; for the grandeur

43

Ibid., p. 159.

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and opulence of the Nation’.44 When he returned to London in 1798, he wrote privately to John Turnbull, his friend and financier, ‘I have definitely decided to make one last attempt to save my country with the aid of England if it is possible’.45 Like Viscardo, he envisioned the audience for his several ‘Proclamas’ (addresses) as ‘Los pueblos del Continente Colombiano’ (the peoples of the Columbian continent), and not geographically specific groups.46 Miranda and Viscardo’s rhetorical and strategic vision of continental revolution had several audiences, yet the consistent message to potential British backers and American creoles was that the human and vast natural resources of the continent could sustain a war against Spain, and the victors would reap the benefits of free trade on both sides of the Atlantic. The commercial message was one that Viscardo and Miranda impressed on potential British supporters, since what both sought was naval and military support from Britain. Viscardo urged ‘The advantages of new commerce underscore the importance of giving the matter serious consideration, since it would form the basis of a solid and useful alliance between Great Britain and Spanish America in the future’.47 Miranda reminded Pitt in 1801 that if Britain did not act, ‘France should have the alliance of the Spanish S American people in a way to command the Sources of Revenue, and to have the ascendant possession of their commerce’.48 The same year, he wrote to South Americans: Con una tierra fertilísima, con metales de toda especie, con todas las producciones del mundo somos miserables, porque el monstruo de la tiranía nos impide el aprovechar estas riquezas. El gobierno español no quiere que seamos ricos, ni que [nos] comuniquemos con otras naciones [para que] no conozcamos el peso de su tiranía. Esta no puede ejercerse sino sobre gentes ignorantes y miserables. (Despite our extremely fertile soil, all kinds of metals, and all the products of the world we are miserable, because the monster of tyranny impedes our enjoyment of this wealth. The Spanish government does not want us to be wealthy, and forbids our communication with other nations so that we do not realize the extent of its tyranny, one that can only be exercised over ignorant and miserable peoples).49 44

45 46

47 48 49

Francisco Miranda, ‘Note Delivered to Mr. Pitt on His Request Desiring to Know Which Were D. Francisco de Miranda’s Views Soon after the Convention with Spain about Nootka-Sound’, Archivo, XV, p. 128. Francisco Miranda, ‘A John Turnbull, Archivo, XVI, p. 95. Francisco Miranda, ‘Juntaos todo bajo la libertad’, in America Espera, ed. by J.L. SalcedoBastardo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1982) p. 263. Cited as Salcedo-Bastardo in notes to follow. Viscardo, ‘Suite Essai’, in Simmons, p. 182. Francisco Miranda, ‘Precis to Mr. Pitt. 11 February 1800’, Archivo, XVI, p. 52. Miranda, ‘Por la Patria el Vivir Es Agradable,’ in Salcedo-Bastardo, p. 261.

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The vastness of the resources of the American continent and its promise of wealth are tropes that, as Mary Louise Pratt has noted, dominated discourse about Latin America in this period.50 Clearly Viscardo and Miranda had put them into circulation well before Alexander von Humboldt’s Views of Nature (1808) through private channels as well as public venues. Von Humboldt’s monumental work gathered and presented the natural history of the continent, but Miranda and Viscardo had plotted the imaginary that conceived it as a political unit with enough resources to sustain armed revolution. This was the image transmitted in ‘Emancipation of Spanish America’ (1809), written by James Mill with Miranda’s input, and published in the Edinburgh Review.51 The article was published just after the first brutal campaigns of 1808, when Napoleon’s forces had met their match in the Iberian peninsula against the Spanish resistance and Wellington’s armies in a campaign that over four years would take over 250,000 lives.52 Mill carefully walks a tightrope between praising the British alliance with Spain and the hope of Spanish American independence, together with the benefits that it would bring Britain. He reminds readers ‘We are now once more at peace with the Spanish nation; and, of course, all idea of using force to detach her colonies is out of the question’.53 Nevertheless, Mill reviews Viscardo y Guzman’s letter, reprints the agreement between Miranda and Spanish American delegates signed in Paris, and goes a long way in rehabilitating the history of British intervention in South America, which by 1809 not only included Miranda’s defeat, but also Sir Home Popham’s failure in Buenos Aires. In Mill’s view, making the case for Spanish American independence did not violate the alliance between Britain and Spain because, should they prevail against Napoleon, he expected the Spanish to ‘relax the severity of its control over its remote dependencies’. Yet he also entertained the scenario that the alliance would fail to contain Napoleon, in which case, Spanish America would become ‘his property’ unless Britain enabled the colonies to ‘constitute themselves a free and independent nation,’ an argument that reflected his conversations with Miranda.54 50

51

52 53

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Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 111-171. The other was a review of a translation of Molina’s Compendio. See ‘The Geographical, Natural, and Civil History of Chili, by Abbe Don J. Ignatius Molina; and an Appendix, Containing copious Extracts from the Araucana of don Alonzo de Ercilla’, Edinburgh Review, 14 (1809), pp. 333-353. Alan Schom, Napoleon Bonaparte (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) p. 469. James Mill, ‘Emancipation of Spanish America’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (1809), 277-311 (p. 297). Ibid., pp. 298-299.

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Miranda emphasizes this view in El Colombiano, the journal he published from London with the editorial assistance of José María Antepara and Manuel Cortés Campomanes.55 Its kairos is set in relation to the events in Peninsular Spain and what they mean for Spanish Americans. The journal addresses ‘la necesidad que tienen los habitantes del Nuevo Mundo deben tener (a lo que creemos) de conocer el estado de las cosas de España, para según las ocurrencias tomar el partido que juzguen conveniente’ (the need that the inhabitants of the New World have of knowing — in our estimation — the state of things in Spain, so that they can decide the course they judge expedient).56 Translation is a key strategy and trope of the journal, since besides news in Spanish, Miranda renders into Spanish texts written in English, French, and Portuguese, even apologizing for a triple translation. ‘El decreto lo habíamos traducido de un papel inglés, que era de una version de la gaceta de Lisboa, de modo que en todas estas traducciones se habrán alterado algo de las frases’ (We translated the decree from an English paper, which was a version of the Lisboa Gazette, so that in all these translations some phrases were altered).57 Translating these multilingual sources projects a discursive transnational space around which Miranda delineates a national one, since the process of translation divides the familiar from the unfamiliar.58 For Miranda, translation also stresses the foreignness of Spain despite the commonality of language between Iberia and America. Instead, Miranda stresses the category of the ‘familiar’ that comprises americanos, his audience, to render Iberian Spanish and Spain as foreign as English, French, or Portuguese. The journal, like the Proclamas and Viscardo’s letter, is addressed to ‘los americanos,’ whose imagined collectivity as an index of nationalism emerges as the legitimacy of the Spanish government and the monarchy is called into question. In Miranda’s treatment, the crisis of sovereignty caused by the abdication of the Spanish king in favor of Joseph, Napoleon’s brother, and the administration of the Junta and the Cortes becomes a crisis of representation.59 If the Spanish nation is not rightfully embodied in the figure 55 56

57 58 59

Racine, Francisco Miranda, p. 97 El Colombiano de Francisco Miranda, ed. by Caracciolo Parra Pérez (Caracas: Secretaria General de la Décima Conferencia Interamericana, 1952), 15 March 1810, p. 1. All citations to El Colombiano are from Parra Pérez’s edition. Miranda, El Colombiano, 15 April 1810, p. 25. Miranda, El Colombiano, 1 April 1810, p. 13. Even before Napoleon’s arrival, the Bourbon monarchy in Spain had been in disarray. Charles IV had abdicated in favor of Ferdinand, but then changed his mind, and ‘he appealed to Napoleon […] Napoleon kindly agreed to “mediate” for them and settle the issue once and for all at Bayonne (on French territory)’. Napoleon double-crossed the

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of Joseph, the colonies are even less represented by Napoleon’s illegitimate government, or the Spanish Junta, which attempted to fill the vacuum left by the king’s abdication, or the Cortes, which acted independently of the Junta. The subversion of legitimacy is evident in Miranda’s own editorial treatment of a statement that Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, an enlightened statesman whose loyalty to the crown was beyond reproach, had made before the Junta as he attempted to define the limits of its authority. Jovellanos, a member of the Junta, declared that it did not derive its authority from absolute national ‘representation,’ and thus whatever decisions it made were subject to review by named deputies from each Spanish province, those who had chosen it as representatives.60 After quoting Jovellanos at length, Miranda points out that since no representatives had been named from the Americas, the Junta had no authority over the colonies. Miranda’s argument hinged on the constitutive dependence between imperial government and colony; for the colonies to exist as such, there had to be a legitimate sovereign, and since there was none, the americanos were not required to follow the interim government. In the same statement where Jovellanos attempted to define the power of the Junta, he defended the popular insurrection against Napoleon on the principle of the illegitimacy of the French government, giving Miranda an opportunity to call into question colonial government itself. Jovellanos stated: ‘Pero todo pueblo [...] que reconoce sobornados o esclavizados los administradores de la autoridad que debía regirle y defenderle, entra naturalmente en necesidad de defenderse, y por consiguiente adquiere derechos extraordinarios y legitimos de insurrección’ (But any nation that recognizes that the administrators of the authority that is supposed to defend and rule it have been bribed or conquered must seek naturally to defend itself and acquires the extraordinary right to insurrection).61 Miranda constructs an analogous situation between the Spanish rebels and their americano counterparts. Just as Joseph’s usurpation unsettled the center of the Spanish state, leaving the provinces free to revolt, the contested legitimacy of the Spanish state collapsed the imperial framework. Absent a center, the dialectic of center and periphery that informs the colonial relationship cannot function; as the Spanish rebelled against the French, americanos could rebel against their oppressors, the Spanish. The representation of the Americas in the Cortes became another rallying point for Miranda. According to the proportional system of representation the

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Spanish royal-family by convincing Carlos IV to abdicate in his own favor, and then manipulating Ferdinand into restoring his father to the throne. See Schom, p. 465. Miranda, El Colombiano, 15 March 1810, p. 2. Ibid.

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Cortes devised, which depended on population, 288 delegates would be from Spain, yet only eight would represent the Americas.62 To Miranda, the disparity between the American population and the number of representatives to which it was entitled exposed the convocation of American delegates as a farce, and called into question the intention of the Cortes towards the colonies. Miranda had only positive words for a Don Esteban Fernández de León, who had been appointed as representative of the New World and declined the post considering himself unqualified for the task.63 Extracts from the letters of Lord Wellington and Sir John Moore further voice Miranda’s most acerbic criticism of the Spanish Junta and Cortes. Statements such as Moore’s ‘La imbecilidad del gobierno español excede toda imaginación’ (the imbecility of the Spanish government exceeds all imagination), and Wellesley’s suggestion that ‘la lamentable insuficiencia del gobierno español ha sido la causa de todos estos desastres’ (the lamentable insufficiency of the Spanish government has been the cause of all these disasters) develop a narrative of a disorganized and ineffectual government, whose unfairness towards American colonies is an expression of its endemic corruption and inability to govern.64 Yet Miranda paints the alternative to this faltering imperial administration as even more noxious, for ‘el poder monstruoso de Napoleón’ is to be feared even more than the Juntas or Cortes. Miranda’s analysis of Napoleon’s grip on Europe follows the Times, his principal source, and he concludes ‘Tal es el poder colosal de Napoleón, y su opresión se aumenta en los mismos grados que su poder’ (Such is the colossal power of Napoleon, and his oppression increases in the same degree as his power).65 To demonstrate Napoleon’s despotism, Miranda provides readers with the text of decrees that restrict the freedom of the press and establish censors for each department in France, and which regulate the treatment of political prisoners, who are denied the right to a trial of their peers. Portraying Napoleon as an unstoppable force who will likely defeat the Spanish army enables Miranda to underscore the fragility of the structures of governance between América and Spain and within Spain itself. One of the most startling documents Miranda includes is a letter from Ferdinand VII to Napoleon where Ferdinand requests to be adopted by the French emperor. He continues ‘Me juzgo digno de esta adopción, que haría la verdadera felicidad de mi vida, tanto por mi perfecto amor y afección a la sagrada persona de S.M. como por mi sumisión y entera 62 63 64 65

Ibid., p. 9. Ibid. Miranda, El Colombiano, 15 April 1810, pp. 33-34. Miranda, El Colombiano, 15 March 1810, p. 19.

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obediencia a sus intenciones y deseos’ (I consider myself worthy of this adoption, which would complete the true happiness of my life, on account of the perfect love and affection I bear his majesty, and for my submission and entire obedience to his wishes).66 Ferdinand’s declaration of allegiance to Napoleon further subverts the idea of a legitimate monarchical center, and gives credence to the possibility that Napoleon might become the possessor of all the colonies of the New World and their wealth. Though most of the issues are devoted to the analysis of the implications of the Napoleonic threat in both Spain and the Americas, Miranda offers suggestions for local governance that reflect his friendships with both Mill and Bentham. The article, entitled ‘Pensamientos de un inglés sobre el estado y presente crisis de los negocios de la América del sur’ (Thoughts of an Englishman on the state and present crisis of South American affairs), offers a decidedly Benthamite reading of what ‘good government’ is. ‘Un buen gobierno es la coordinación de los negocios de un pueblo, por la cual todas las clases de este pueblo convienen mutualmente en abandonar cada una de ellas, por amor de la paz y felicidad común, todo lo que puede ser perjudicial a las otras’ (Good government is the coordination of the affairs of a country so that all classes agree on setting aside those interests that might be prejudicial to the others for the peace and the common good).67 The author urges South Americans to strive for ‘disinterest and docility’ in order to achieve the ideal government. He calls for the separation of church and state, and above all, the protection of private property as a buttress against violent revolution, since the protection of property also guarantees personal security. ‘Nada más importante en la causa de la libertad, que en la seguridad de todos los individuos de la sociedad y de sus propiedades’ (There is nothing more important to the cause of liberty than the security of persons and their properties). The author presents the French Revolution and Napoleon as cautionary examples of the anarchy and despotism that ensue if these principles are not followed. St Domingue, however, was the unspoken yet very present scenario before Miranda’s transnational audience.68 The contradiction between the vision of ‘disinterest’ that each class would pursue and the call to protect private property, which in this case included slaves, reveals a blind spot in Miranda’s ideology, one that was shared by other independence leaders. That slaves were not considered to be as deserving of 66 67 68

Miranda, El Colombiano, 15 May 1810, p. 67. Miranda, El Colombiano, 1 May 1810, p. 46. See David Geggus, ‘The Sounds and Echoes of Freedom: The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on Latin America’, in Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America, ed. by Darién J. Davis (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2007), pp. 19-36.

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‘liberty’ as their creole counterparts speaks to the deeply racialized hierarchy of Spanish American society, which reproduced the Spanish fetishism of pureza de sangre in its vision of the americano nation. These entrenched attitudes delayed the abolition of slavery throughout South America and functioned to justify its persistence through the second half of the century in the Caribbean. While Miranda’s Colombiano used translation and outlined transnational spaces to define a national consciousness for Spanish Americans, Blanco White addressed ‘los españoles de ambos mundos’ with the initial goal of presenting a mediating stance before the debates between the americanos and the Cortes, and the larger project of persuading his americanos of pursuing internal reform rather than armed revolution. The sense of writing to an audience in ‘ambos mundos’ informed his organization of the journal. Blanco prints ‘Extractos de las Gacetas Americanas’ (Extracts from American Gazettes) alongside the latest decrees of the Cortes, and news from England and France. Thus independence leaders in Mexico could read about Cabildos in Buenos Aires, and Spaniards in Cádiz were privy to the thinking in Caracas, not to mention Blanco’s incisive and provocative political analysis. In the midst of the Napoleonic wars, his prescient warning to Spanish and Mexican readers that the newly formed United States would set its sights on conquering Mexico decades before Manifest Destiny became a political doctrine exemplifies the scope of Blanco’s political vision.69 El Español, as he repeatedly declares, is in the service of the Spanish nation, but for Blanco, this nation is not confined to Europe. When in 1811 Caracas named him an honorary citizen, he responded: ‘Propuse coadyuvar con todas mis fuerzas a conciliar la felicidad de la España americana, de esa parte de mi nación a quien convidaba la buena fortuna, con la de esta porción desgraciada de Europa que gime oprimida bajo todo genero de males’ (I proposed to reconcile with all my strength the happiness of American Spain, that part of my nation which invited good fortune, with this portion in Europe, which moans oppressed under all manner of misfortunes).70

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Blanco White, ‘Otras observaciones sobre América,’ in Conversaciones americanas y otros escritos sobre España y sus Indias, ed. by Manuel Moreno Alonso (Madrid: Instituto de Cultura Hispánica), p. 94. Moreno Alonso excerpts all articles pertaining to the Americas in El Español, calling special attention to the Conversaciones, which feature dialogues between a priest who has resided in the Americas for over 40 years, a tax collector from Andalucia, a cacique, and a young man, the priest’s nephew. ‘Del Secretario de relaciones exteriores del Gobierno de Caracas: Respuesta’ in Conversaciones, p. 117.

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The ‘happiness’ that Blanco stresses was Venezuela’s short-lived ‘revolución sin sangre’ (bloodless revolution), when it declared its independence in light of the crisis of sovereignty in Spain. The alternative of organized and armed insurrection horrified Blanco. As André Pons writes, Blanco ‘temía que la democracia y los excesos revolucionarios precipitaran las antiguas colonias al caos [...] cuando la caída de la República venezolana confirmó sus temores, intentó preservar a las otras colonias del contagio jacobino’ (he feared that democracy and revolutionary excesses would precipitate the old colonies into chaos [...] when the Venezuelan Republic fell and confirmed his fears, he attempted to protect the other colonies from Jacobin contagion).71 That Miranda and later Bolívar relied on El Español to cement their case against the Spanish crown is in Pons’ view a distortion of Blanco White’s moderation and his conciliatory stance. To support his case against the Cortes, Miranda reprinted sections of Blanco’s articles in El Colombiano, while later Bolívar referred to Blanco in the Carta de Jamaica (1815). Bolívar writes ‘Sobre la naturaleza de los gobiernos españoles, sus decretos conminatorios y hostiles, el curso entero de su desesperada conducta hay escritos, del mayor mérito, en el periódico El Español, cuyo autor es el señor Blanco’ (Regarding the nature of the Spanish governments, their hostile and threatening decrees, and the entire desperate course of their conduct, there are writings of the greatest merit in El Español, authored by Mr Blanco).72 Pons observes that ‘el periódico de Blanco White en manos de Miranda se convertía en un panfleto ardiente, tanto más peligroso cuanto que estaba respaldado por la autoridad moral del Precursor’ (In Miranda’s hands, Blanco White’s newspaper became an inflammatory pamphlet, all the more dangerous because it was backed with the moral authority of the Precursor).73 Pons’ alarm is somewhat overstated since, as he reminds us, Blanco’s journal was readily available throughout the Americas, and American readers could make up their own minds about the incendiary nature of the excerpts reprinted in El Colombiano.74 Moreover, in introducing the excerpts, Miranda himself noted ‘Este papel hace honor a su autor por sus sentimientos de patriotismo, por sus conocimientos del estado de España, y por el modo juicioso en que hace conocer las causas principales del mal suceso de los españoles en la presente lucha contra sus enemigos’ ([El Español] does its author an honor on account of his patriotism, his knowledge about Spain, and his judicious exposition of the principal causes for the reverses the Spanish 71 72 73 74

Pons, p. 133. Simón Bolívar, ‘Carta de Jamaica’, p. 72. Pons, 283. These were reprinted in the May issues of El Colombiano.

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suffer against their enemies).75 Given Pons’ sustained defense of Blanco against charges of treason — charges answered by Blanco himself when at the urging of the Spanish government, the Regency proscribed the publication of El Español in England — the claim that criollo readers are responsible for Blanco’s radicalization and not from anything that Blanco wrote is understandable.76 Yet the radical interpretation that Miranda and Bolívar gleaned from Blanco’s text had its origin in Blanco’s address of americanos as the equals of Spaniards, ‘los españoles de uno y otro continente’, separated by geography, but not by an accident of birth or loyalties. Evoking a filial metaphor, Blanco reminds his European and continental readers ‘Nunca se aman tanto dos hermanos como cuando, viviendo en el seno de una misma familia, ninguno molesta al otro con pretensiones de preferencia’ (Never do two brothers love each other more, who, despite living in the same family, do not fight for preferential treatment).77 This transterritorial vision of españoles americanos and españoles europeos as forming a complete nation engenders Blanco’s unintended radicalism. The more he moves to conciliate americanos with the Spanish government, the

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Miranda, El Colombiano, 1 May 1810, p. 47. Blanco wrote ‘Prohibir El Español por contener principios contrarios a los que el gobierno le parecía que debieran propagarse, hubiera sido un acto de despotismo; pero prohibir El Español, no en España, no en Cádiz, sino en países distantes para poder hacer a su autor personalmente odioso, esparciendo contra él calumnias [...] es un punto de degradación incredible, no ya en un gobierno, pero ni en caballeros que hayan tenido educación de tales’ (To censure El Español for containing principles contrary to those which the government considers should be propagated, would have been an act of despotism; but to prohibit El Español, not in Spain, not in Cádiz, but in distant countries in order to make its author hateful, spreading calumnies against him [...] is an incredible point of degradation, not only in a government, but also in gentlemen who claim to be educated as such). Conversaciones, p. 96. Of the later opprobrium directed against Blanco, the damning judgment of prominent Spanish man of letters and scholar Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo is most often quoted. Referring to El Español, he wrote, ‘Empresa más abominable y antipatriótica no podía darse en medio de la Guerra de Independencia [...] desde el número tercero comenzó a defender sin rebozo a los insurrectos americanos contra la metrópoli’ (In the midst of the War of Independence, there could not have been a more abominable and antipatriotic enterprise. From the third number onwards, [Blanco] began defending the American insurgents against the metropolis). Qutd in James D. Fernández, ‘Los matices americanos de Blanco White,’ in José María Blanco White: crítica y exilio, ed. by Eduardo Subirats (Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, 2005), p. 120. See also Juan Goytisolo, ‘Presentación crítica de José María Blanco White,’ in Obra inglesa de Blanco White, ed. by Juan Goytisolo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974) for the first major reappraisal of Blanco’s position in Spanish cultural history and answer to Menéndez Pelayo. Blanco White, ‘Integridad de la monarquía española,’ Conversaciones, p. 65.

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more he insists on their rights as full subjects of the crown, entitled to the same benefits as those born in Spain. Blanco elaborates his critiques of the policies that the Cortes and Juntas pursued on the basis of his desire for legal, racial, and representative equality between españoles and americanos. History grounds his view of relations between Spain and the Americas, and in Blanco’s reading, the structure of American society is buckling under the abuses of power that saturate imperial government. As the enlightened priest explains to his nephew, whom he educates in the Americas: ‘La sociedad americo-española está fundada […] sobre la opresión de los indios, la esclavitud de los negros, la degradación de los mulatos y mestizos, el menos aprecio, por no decir menosprecio, de los criollos, y la superioridad y orgullo de los españoles’ (Spanish-American society is founded [...] on the oppression of indigenous peoples, the slavery of blacks, the degradation of mulattoes and mestizos, and the lesser consideration, not to say disregard of creoles, and the haughtiness and pride of the Spaniards).78 The priest exposes the state-sanctioned racial violence that informs the practice and ideology of imperium. His concatenation of the histories of indigenous peoples and criollos in the Americas resembles Viscardo y Guzman’s and Miranda’s in its sweeping linkage between the originary moment of the conquest ‘la opresión de los indios’ and legal policies such as the exclusion of criollos, mestizos and mulatos from holding administrative offices.79 Blanco’s priest goes a step further by including the institutionalization of plantation slavery and its continuation among the ‘oppressions’ that undermine equality in Spanish American society, an idea that reflects Blanco’s own engagement with British abolitionist thought.80 He calls attention to the injurious effects of the ideology of pureza de sangre by suggesting that slavery forms part of the racialized layers of privilege institutionalized in colonial society, and by extension, in Spanish society itself. Christopher Britt-Arredondo shows that the reception of Blanco’s analysis of the bankruptcy of Spanish racialized policies was a retrenchment into ‘la doble tiranía Hispánica, defendiendo su identidad castiza, y negando la decadencia nacional-imperial de España’ (the double Hispanic tyranny, that defended its pure identity and denied Spain’s imperial and national 78 79

80

Blanco White, ‘Conversación 1era’, Conversaciones, p. 55. Blanco White, ‘Sobre la conciliación de España con sus Américas,’ in Conversaciones, p. 134. See also Anderson, pp. 57-58. For a discussion of Blanco’s translation of Wilberforce’s A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807), see André Pons, ‘Blanco White, Abolicionista’ Cuadernos hispanoamericanos, 559 (1997), pp. 63-76.

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decadence).81 That Spain would return to its defining national myths such as the Reconquista, despite all its implications, to forge a resistance to the Napoleonic siege has to be taken into account when reading the Spanish response to Blanco’s progressive ideals for reform.82 Yet this retrenchment had real consequences. It partially accounts for the Cortes’ several failed attempts to imagine what a representative delegation from the Americas would look like and what fair representation would consist of. In El Colombiano, Miranda had clearly taken issue with the problem of representation; Blanco returns to this point to explain why the dialogue between the Cortes and the American territories continued to falter. Blanco’s guiding premise is that ‘Si las Américas son provincias de España, iguales deben ser con ellas en derechos, sean cuales fueran las consequencias’ (If the Americas are provinces of Spain, they must be equal in rights, regardless of the consequences). Blanco argues that Americans have the right to representation following the same selection procedures as for representatives in Spain; while this right was granted in one of the decrees issued by the Cortes, it was never enacted. Citing Burke, Blanco declares that ‘El pueblo de América ha estado trescientos años en la completa esclavitud’ (The people of America have been enslaved for over 300 years), and suggests that Spain is making the same mistakes that England made towards its North American colonies.83 To salvage the ‘gran nación’ of Spain in Europe and America, Blanco recommends that the Cortes treat declarations of independence by Juntas in Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Mexico just as it treated independent juntas in Spain (‘Otras observaciones’, p. 92). Spain’s armed response to Mexico, however, destroyed all possibility of reconciliation between españoles americanos and españoles europeos. In a bold move, Blanco draws parallels between the behavior of Spanish troops and commanders in Mexico, and those of Napoleon in Spain. He gives Napoleon a monologue in which he declaims his intentions for Spain, and alternates it with Spain’s plans for America. ‘A mí me acomoda, dice Napoleón, redondear a mi imperio con la España, y quiero tenerla a mi disposición aunque sea con perjuicio de ella’ (I fancy rounding off my empire with Spain, and I want to have her at my disposal, though it may be to her harm). Spain then states ‘A mí me es necesaria la América, dice la España, y debo conservarla a mí disposición, aunque ninguna ventaja resulte 81

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Christopher Britt-Arredondo, ‘Blanco White ante el casticismo español,’ in José Blanco White, crítica y exilio, ed. by Eduardo Subirats, p. 109. See Alicia Laspra’s essay in this collection for a discussion of the role of Reconquista symbolism in pro-Spanish writing in Britain. Blanco White, ‘Otras observaciones sobre América,’ in Conversaciones, pp. 83, 87, 93.

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de esto a aquellos pueblos’ (I need America, and I must keep her at my beck and call, though no advantage may result to those peoples).84 Napoleon serves as a mirror for the resurgence of Spain’s imperialist turn towards the Americas, despite its own bloody struggle against a man who Blanco presents as having no hesitation killing ‘dos o tres millones de habitantes’ (two or three million inhabitants). This resurgence of militant imperialism strikes Blanco as a fatal choice that ‘ha aumentado los odios, y no hay medio de apagarlos’ (has fomented hatreds, and there is no way of quenching them).85 Even after this point of no return, Blanco posits the intervention of Britain as a neutral party that could negotiate a military truce between Spain and the Americas, and lead a political negotiation that would reestablish the transterritorial unity of the ‘gran nación’. ‘La interpocisión decidida de Inglaterra para impedir el decreto de la Regencia contra Caracas, hubiera cortado en su raíz todos los males que han sufrido y sufren América y España’ (The decisive intervention of England to prevent the decree of the Regency against Caracas would have rooted out the evils that America and Spain suffer). Blanco suggests that Britain’s inaction in relation to Latin America after its failed invasion of Buenos Aires is proof of its disinterest, since it had the option of sending its navy to the Americas instead of to Spain, yet it chose to assist the Spanish cause.86 While the Anglo-Hispanic alliance against France mitigated suspicions the Spanish may have had about the British as brokers of a peace between them and the Americas, Blanco’s vindication of British neutrality was difficult given years of Spanish intelligence on Miranda’s longstanding involvement with British prime ministers since Pitt. Furthermore, the powerful business interests behind the Regencia’s declaration of war against Caracas, who wanted to safeguard their monopoly in the Americas, would not countenance potential competitors as intermediaries. In retrospect, Blanco’s plan for an alliance between England, Spain, and the Americas might have averted for a time the war that unfolded between la España en América y la España en Europa while the Spanish resistance and British forces accelerated Napoleon’s defeat. Instead, British soldiers joined Bolívar’s and San Martín’s armies to fight and defeat their erstwhile allies. In 1823, Blanco reflected ‘los Republicanos de la América Española no cumplirían con los deberes de la gratitud si no mirasen a la Inglaterra como origen, en parte, de la libertad que empiezan a gozar’ (the Republicans of 84 85 86

Blanco White, ‘La revolución del reino de México,’ in Conversaciones, p. 106. Ibid. Blanco White,‘Sobre la reconciliación de España con sus Americas’, in Conversaciones, pp. 125-126.

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Spanish America would not fulfill their duties of gratitude if they did not regard Britain as the origin, in part, of the liberty they begin to enjoy).87 While Blanco may have been alluding to British military and economic investment, he could have as easily been speaking about himself, Miranda, Bello and their friends: for it was in London where the transnational community of américanos y españoles would imagine the New World, not as a colony, but as its own fecund country.

Bibliography Aguirre, Robert. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) Almeida, Joselyn M., ‘Conquest and Slavery in Robert Southey’s Madoc and James Montgomery’s The West Indies’, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. by Lynda Pratt (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2006) ——, ‘Blanco White and the Making of Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism’, European Romantic Review, 17 (2006), 437-456. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991) Bain, Alexander, James Mill: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1882) Baucom, Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) Blanco White, José, The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White: Written by Himself, ed. by John Hamilton Thom, 3 vols (London: J. Chapman, 1845) ——, ‘Otras observaciones sobre América,’ in Conversaciones americanas y otros escritos sobre España y sus Indias, ed. by Manuel Moreno Alonso (Madrid: Instituto de Cultura Hispánica) ——, ‘Vida de Simón Bolívar,’ Variedades, 1 January, 1823, p. 12. Bentham, Jeremy, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Correspondence, ed. by Stephen Conway, 21 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), VIII Britt-Arredondo, Christopher, ‘Blanco White ante el casticismo español,’ in José María Blanco White, crítica y exilio, ed. by Eduardo Subirats (Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, 2005) Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, How To Write a History of the New World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) 87

Blanco White,‘Vida de Simón Bolívar,’ Variedades, 1 January, 1823, p. 12.

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Cole Heinowitz, Rebecca, ‘Thy World Columbus Shall Be Free’: British Romantic Deviance and Spanish American Revolution’, European Romantic Review (2006), 151-159. Damián, Jessica, ‘Helen Maria Williams’ Personal Narrative of Travels from Peru to Peruvian Tales,” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies (2007) Dávila, Vicente, ed., Archivo del General Miranda, 24 vols (Caracas: Editorial Sur-Americana, 1929-50) Essick, Robert N., and Morton D. Paley, eds., Robert Blair’s The Grave, Illustrated by William Blake: a Study with Facsimile (London: Scolar Press, 1982) Faist, Thomas, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Fernández, James D., ‘Los matices americanos de Blanco White,’ in José María Blanco White: crítica y exilio, ed. by Eduardo Subirats (Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, 2005) Ford, John, ‘Rudolph Ackermann: Publisher to Latin America’, in Bello y Londres: Segundo Congreso del Bicentenario, ed. by Oscar Sambrano, Rafael Caldera, and Pedro Grases, 2 vols (Caracas: Fundación La Casa de Bello, 1980) Geggus, David, ‘The Sounds and Echoes of Freedom: The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on Latin America’, in Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America, ed. by Darién J. Davis (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2007) ‘The Geographical, Natural, and Civil History of Chili, by Abbe Don J. Ignatius Molina; and an Appendix, Containing copious Extracts from the Araucana of don Alonzo de Ercilla’, Edinburgh Review, 14 (1809) Goytisolo, Juan, ‘Presentación crítica de José María Blanco White,’ in Obra inglesa de Blanco White, ed. by Juan Goytisolo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974) Grases, Pedro, Tres empresas periodísticas de Andres Bello: Bibliografía de la Biblioteca Americana y el Repertorio Americano (Caracas: 1955) Bello, Andrés, Selected Writings of Andrés Bello, ed. by Iván Jaksic, trans. by Frances M. López-Morrillas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Leask, Nigel, ‘Southey’s Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America’, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. by Lynda Pratt (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2006) Llorens, Vicente, Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en inglaterra (México: Colegio de México, 1952)

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McEvoy, Carmen, and Ana María Stuven, eds., La república peregrina: hombres de armas y letras en América del Sur, 1800-1884 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2007) Mill, James, ‘Emancipation of Spanish America’, Edinburgh Review, 13 (1809), 277-311. Murphy, Martin, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) Nuñez, Ignacio, An Account, Historical, Political, and Statistical of the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata (London: R. Ackermann, 1825) Parra Pérez, Caracciolo, ed., El Colombiano de Francisco Miranda (Caracas: Secretaria General de la Decima Conferencia Interamericana, 1952) Pons, André, Blanco White y América (Universidad de Oviedo: 2006) ——, ‘Blanco White, Abolicionista’, Cuadernos hispanoamericanos, 559 (1997), 63-76. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) Pries, Ludger, ‘The Approach of Transnational Social Spaces: Responding to New Configurations of the Social and the Spatial’, New Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies in the TwentyFirst Century (London: Routledge, 2001) Racine, Karen, ‘Imagining Independence: London’s Spanish American Community 1790-1829’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Tulane University, 1996) ——, Francisco de Miranda: a Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington: SR Books, 2003) ——, ‘Love in the Time of Revolution: Francisco de Miranda’s Relationships with Women’, in Francisco de Miranda: Exile and Enlightenment, ed by. John Maher (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2006) Richardson, Alan, ‘Epic Ambivalence: Imperial Politics and Romantic Deflection in William’s Peru and Landor’s Gebir,’ in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) Robertson, William, The Life of Miranda, 2 vols (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1929) Roldán Vera, Eugenia, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge in Transcontinental Perspective (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2003) Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)

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Salcedo-Bastardo, J.L., ed., America Espera (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1982) Schom, Alan, Napoleon Bonaparte (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) Simmons, Merle E., Los escritos de Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán (Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 1983) Simón Bolívar: Escritos Políticos, ed. by Graciela Soriano (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990) Smith, Jeremy, Europe and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism, and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2006) Sweet, Nanora, ‘Hitherto Closed to British Enterprise: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World Circa 1815’, European Romantic Review, 8 (1997), 139-147. Vergara Arias, Gustavo, Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán (Lima: Universidad Nacional de Perú, 1963)

Tim Fulford

‘El Diablo’ and ‘El Ángel del Cielo!’: Thomas and Kitty Cochrane and the Romanticisation of Revolution in South America ‘His adventures have been so romantic — and his achievements so splendid, that no Englishman can read them without pride, that such things have been done by his countryman’. With these words Sir James Mackintosh paid tribute to a man who seemed more like a Byronic hero than Byron himself. The man was Thomas Cochrane, naval captain, convict, and radical, the ‘sea wolf’ who had destroyed more French shipping than any other officer, who had eloped with a beautiful sixteen-year old orphan and taken her into battle with him, and who, rejected by the British establishment for involvement in a Stock Exchange scam, hired himself out as the Admiral of revolutionary Chile, Peru and Brazil, vanquishing the Spanish and Portuguese fleets and turning the dream of South American liberty into reality. Later he would lead the Greek fleet against the Ottomans, living out the transcontinental revolution which Byron hailed in ‘The Age of Bronze’. Even to the man himself, his adventures seemed remarkable: ‘without a particle of romance in my composition’, he wrote, ‘my life has been one of the most romantic on record’. Others agreed: Lord St Vincent said he was ‘mad, romantic, money-getting, and not truthtelling’; Walter Scott hailed him in specially-written verse. My chapter will consider Cochrane as Romantic hero, examining the construction of his public image and arguing that his reputation, as well as the deeds by which he confirmed that reputation, made South American liberation a romantic cause. I will suggest that Cochrane benefited from the stereotype of the chivalric hero that writers such as Scott and Southey were redefining for a nation at war.

On 3rd October 1825 an extraordinary couple went to the theatre in Edinburgh. He was a convicted criminal and the son of an Earl. She was the wife with whom he had eloped when she was a sixteen-year old orphan. They had later married again, twice. Now, taking their seats quietly, they watched the performance attentively until, towards the end, mention was made of South America. At once, the audience rose en masse, turned towards them, and cheered. So long and loud was the cheering, indeed, that she was overcome by feeling and burst into tears. Walter Scott, who was present in the audience, was sufficiently moved that he put the occasion into a poem dedicated to her: I knew the Lady by that glorious eye, By that pure brow and those dark locks of thine, I knew thee for a soldier’s bride and high My full heart bounded. For the golden mine

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Of Heavenly thought kindled at sight of thee Radiant with all the stars of memory. Thy name ask Brazil, for she knows it well, It is a name a Hero gave to thee. In every letter lurks there not a spell, The mighty spell of immortality? Ye sail together down time’s glittering stream; Around your heads two kindred haloes gleam. Even now, as through the air the plaudits ring, I marked the smiles that in her features came. She caught the word that fell from every tongue And her eye brightened at her Cochrane’s name, And brighter yet became the dark eyes’ blaze — It was his Country and she felt the praise. May the Gods guard thee, Lady, wheresoe’er Thou wanderest in thy love and loveliness. For thee may every scene and sky be fair Each hour instinct with more than happiness. May all thou valuest be good and great, And be thy wishes thy own future state.1

The lady whom Scott addressed was ‘Kitty’, and she was the beautiful wife of Thomas Cochrane, Scot, nobleman, M.P., and (in the eyes of British law) a criminal who had served time in prison for committing a fraud upon the Stock Exchange. Above all else, however — and this was why the audience rose to its feet in tribute — Cochrane was the daring sea-captain who, having been unfairly dismissed from the Royal Navy, had become the great Admiral of revolutionary Chile and Brazil who had helped bring about the liberation of South America. He was, in the eyes of patriotic Britons, an authentic radical and romantic hero, a man who vindicated the audience’s belief in British, and especially Scottish, military glory. And his wife, who had travelled with him, was a romantic heroine for ladies to admire and gentlemen to adore. She was known to have crossed the Andes on foot, traversed raging torrents on the narrowest of rope bridges, fired the guns of her husband’s ship in battle, and fought an assassin in her bedchamber. Together, the glittering couple symbolised to liberal Edinburgh the virtues it liked to think were quintessentially British: valour, nobility, and the love of liberty. 1

The story and the verses are included in Robert Harvey, Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain (London: Constable & Robinson, 2001), p. 288. Henceforth cited as Harvey.

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By their heroic victory against the old colonial enemy, Spain, and by the manner of their conduct during the struggle, they sanctified the cause of South American revolution. South America had long been a fascinating, but littleknown zone, seen through the writings of travellers as a place of natural wonders, through the pages of historians as the location of the civilised barbarism of the Incas, and through the ledgers of merchants and manufacturers who calculated upon large profits in supplying its markets. 2 Now, through the Cochranes’ exploits above all, it acquired a romantic and patriotic aura, and this aura was to have major effects on both sides of the Atlantic.3 I shall explore the effects of the Cochranes’ reputation on British/South American affairs later in this essay. First, however, it is necessary to tell the story of who they were, how they got involved in the struggles of the Hispanic world, and how their reputation was constructed in the British press — in magazines, journals, travel-narratives, and in songs, poems and novels. We shall see that they lived out, and in turn helped to define, the roles of Romantic hero and heroine of which a nation at war with Napoleon was so much in need. Thomas Cochrane was the son of a Scottish nobleman who had had lost what remained of the family fortune in developing his inventions. Without an income, but with the pride and determined independence that was part of aristocrats’ self-image, he entered the navy in 1793 at the age of seventeen. For the next twenty years, the navy was the most exciting military service for a nation at war with revolutionary France and its allies, including, until 1808, Spain. Seamen were romantic figures, held up for admiration in songs, plays and poems commemorating the great battles at Camperdown, St Vincent and the Nile. Sailors adopted the glamorous image of themselves: not only, for instance, was the patriotic song ‘Hearts of Oak’ sung about them in theatres and festivities, but it was also performed on board — in the captains’ cabins and on deck, calling the men to action stations. 2

3

Contemporary critical interpretations of romantic-era Britain’s fascination with South America — at the levels of culture and literature as much as financial — have also stressed the works of travel writers such as Alexander von Humboldt and of economists such as J. S. Mill, neglecting the importance of the popular and influential press reports of Britons’ military exploits in the independence wars. This essay aims, therefore, to add to the exemplary analysis of the role of natural history and economics made in such works as Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) and Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). The British press also covered the valiant actions of William Miller, who fought alongside Cochrane and San Martin in Chile and Peru, of the Irishman Daniel O’Leary, Bolívar’s aide, and of the mainly ex-Peninsular War soldiers who fought in Venezuela as the British Legion.

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Come, cheer up, my lads! ’tis to glory we steer, To add something more to this wonderful year: To honour we call you, not press you like slaves: For who are so free as the sons of the waves? Hearts of oak are our ships, Gallant tars are our men; We always are ready: Steady, boys, steady! We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again. We ne’er see our foes but we wish them to stay; They never see us but they wish us away; If they run, why, we follow, or run them ashore; For if they won’t fight us, we cannot do more. Hearts of oak, etc. Britannia triumphant, her ships sweep the sea; Her standard is Justice — her watchword, ‘Be free!’ Then cheer up, my lads! with one heart let us sing, ‘Our soldiers, our sailors, our statesmen, and king.’ Hearts of oak, etc.4

The famous tenor John Braham began his operatic career performing ‘Hearts of Oak’ to the officers of his ship: by hearing (and singing) such songs they, like the common crew, reaffirmed their desire to follow in the wake of the captains of the past whose victories were already legendary. Achieving his first command in 1800, Cochrane soon became legendary himself. Although his ship, The Speedy, had only 14 guns, he sought out and won encounters with much larger enemy vessels. So daring was he that he reminded the public of the national hero from the days of Queen Elizabeth, 4

The words of ‘Hearts of Oak’ were written by David Garrick. On Braham and on naval songs see Gillian Russell, Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

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the privateer-turned-naval commander Francis Drake, whose tiny ships had out-manoeuvred the mighty Spanish Armada in 1588. Like Drake, Cochrane was fighting Britain’s oldest maritime enemy, the Spanish, for Spain’s navy was allied to France at this point. This fact made his exploits seem all-themore part of an heroic national tradition. And this new hero was Drake-like in his piratical tactics: he eluded one Spanish warship, for instance, by hoisting a Dutch flag and pretending his ship was plague-ridden. He captured another, the 32 gun frigate El Gamo, by flying an American flag until he had come so close to it that, when he ran British colours up the mast and opened fire, Gamo could not depress its guns enough to hit the Speedy’s hull. Cochrane then pulled away each time the Spanish tried to board his ship, waiting till he had raked their boarding-parties with shot before closing again and boarding the Gamo. He led the attack himself, fighting with pistol and cutlass on the main deck. But it was intelligence as well as bravery that won the day: he sent half of the Speedy’s crew to blacken their faces and board the Gamo, unseen, by climbing its hull from the bows. Appearing on deck shrieking like so many devils, they demoralised the already desperate Spanish. The final strokes included more deception: Cochrane shouting an order to the only man in fact left on the Speedy to send in the marines supposedly awaiting their moment below decks; one of the Speedy’s crew lowering the Spanish flag on the Gamo to make its crew believe its officers had surrendered. Fighting ceased, and when the smoke cleared it became clear that the 319 men of El Gamo had been taken (263 of them unhurt) by the 51 of The Speedy. When the news reached Britain, Cochrane became famous: the public flocked to see fashionable artist Nicholas Pocock’s painting of Cochrane’s tiny ship dwarfed by its prize. The romantic reputation of naval men peaked in 1805 with the death of Nelson in victory over the combined Spanish and French fleets at Trafalgar. In an outpouring of patriotic fervour, Nelson became a saviour and a saint, an epitome of all the virtues Britons wished to imagine were essentially theirs — daring, dedication to duty, love of country, willpower, paternal authority, undemonstrative courage under fire, self-sacrifice, chivalry, and honour. Hymned in song, praised in poetry, depicted on every available surface that could bear an image, Nelson became a consumer item, an icon of Britishness one could hang on one’s wall and place on one’s dinner table, as well as a public hero visible in statues and monuments. As such, he provided a role model to which the public expected its sailors to aspire. Cochrane certainly aspired: in 1799, when still a lowly lieutenant, he had met Nelson and been favoured with frank discussions of naval tactics. The Admiral had, he remembered, lost patience with his technical language and declared ‘Never

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mind manoeuvres, always go at them’.5 Cochrane followed this advice all his career, recognising that Nelson was ‘an embodiment of dashing courage’ whose daring was nevertheless based on careful calculation of risk and meticulous planning.6 The years following Trafalgar gave Cochrane plenty of opportunity to live up to Nelson’s reputation. Such were the vagaries of war, however, that by 1808 he found himself no longer fighting against Spain but in alliance with it. It was in that year that Anglo-Hispanic relations changed irrevocably, in a course of events that would lead to revolution and war in Spain and Portugal and the eventual independence of their colonies. Before 1808, Britain, as Spain’s enemy, had become a refuge for those who wished to overthrow Spanish control of South America. Among these men was Francisco de Miranda, former French Revolutionary. Miranda won support from liberal Britons who saw Spain as a byword for tyranny and who wanted to open South America to British merchants and manufacturers. But his invasion plans won little open countenance from the British government which, despite its enmity to Spain, was reluctant to risk a military expedition so far from Europe, at such great expense, and one, moreover, intended to foment revolution against an established ruler (precisely what they were fighting against in France). Matters altered when Napoleon invaded Iberia in 1807. Faced with French domination of the South American colonies’ mother country, and the closing of Europe’s markets to British goods, Britons began to support revolution in South America. On 9 January 1808 the Times gave support to an expedition to liberate Venezuela on the grounds that ‘as all Europe is now enslaved, it may be better for us to have free States, than dependent ones, in the rest of the world’.7 In these new circumstances ministers overcame their scepticism about commercial prospects and their antipathy to revolutionary movements, and began to raise an expeditionary force, commanded by Sir Arthur Wellesley, to assist Miranda in South America’s liberation. Before it could set sail, matters altered again when, in May 1808, the Spaniards rose in revolt against Napoleon, after he forced their king to abdicate in favour of his brother Joseph Bonaparte. Britain now allied itself to the Spanish and Portuguese; Wellesley’s force was diverted from South America to Iberia

5

6 7

Admiral Lord Cochrane, The Autobiography of a Seaman (1860) (London: Chatham, 2000), p. 37. Henceforth cited as Autobiography. Ibid. For other articles supporting military action against the colonies see Gentleman’s Magazine, 75.1 (Jan. 1805), 57-59; Monthly Review, 51 (Nov. 1806), 325.

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itself.8 The government favoured attacking Napoleon directly in Iberia, and would not countenance aiding the liberation of its new allies’ South American colonies. And so it was that Cochrane found himself part of a fleet designed to support the British army in Iberia by harrassing the French. In this new role, he excelled, launching daring raids onshore with such success that, in Walter Scott’s words, during the month of September 1808, with his single ship, [he] kept the whole coast of Languedoc in alarm — destroyed the numerous semaphoric telegraphs, which were of the utmost consequence to the numerous coasting convoys of the French, and not only prevented any troops from being sent from that province into Spain, but even excited such dismay that 2000 men were withdrawn from Figueras to oppose him, when they would otherwise have been marching farther into the peninsula. The coasting trade was entirely suspended during this alarm; yet with such consummate prudence were all Cochrane’s enterprises planned and executed that not one of his men were either killed or hurt, except one, who was singed in blowing up a battery. (cited in Autobiography, p. 191)

It was in tribute to these predatory raids that Napoleon nicknamed Cochrane ‘loup de mers’, and the papers at home identified him as part of a great British naval tradition — Cochrane was one of those ‘officers in the British Navy who have given undoubted proofs of their genius as well as courage’ (Scott, cited in Autobiography, p. 191). The culmination of Cochrane’s actions in support of Spanish resistance to French occupation came in November 1808 at the town of Rosas, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast where the Pyrenees meet the sea. A French column of 6000 men was marching south into Catalonia to crush the Spaniards for good. Cochrane determined, with his single ship, to stop it. He occupied an old fort on the cliffs and prepared his defences for the onslaught from artillery and infantry he knew would come. The bombardment lasted days, but only led the French into a brilliantly-conceived and deadly trap. Calculating that the French would only be able to breach and enter the fort fifty feet up one of its towers, Cochrane had knocked the internal floors of the tower away. When the French reached the top of their scaling ladders and climbed through the hole their guns had made, they found themselves perched on a speciallygreased wooden platform Cochrane had erected. They fell to their deaths on spikes below, or died in the hail of musket fire Cochrane’s men sent their way. As more French infantry climbed the ladders, Cochrane set off a huge mine he had prepared, killing hundreds. By such means, although outnumbered almost a hundred to one, he held the fort for a week, delaying 8

See the discussion of Wellesley’s negotiation with Miranda in Robert Harvey, Liberators: South America’s Savage Wars of Freedom 1810-30 (London: Robinson, 2002), pp. 57-58.

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the enemy advance and severely depleting its resources. And he did this although a splinter of granite sent flying by the French guns smashed into his nose, piercing through to his mouth. Back in Britain, The Naval Gazette reported that with a ‘handful of men [...] Lord Cochrane made the most astonishing exertions’.9 Cochrane led by example and it was this quality, as much as his ingenuity, which made him a romantic figure. At Rosas, it was reported, when the French artillery brought the Spanish flag crashing down into the ditch in front of the tower, Cochrane coolly walked out of the fort, through the French fire, picked up the flag, waved it, and returned at walking pace. Of this incident the Gerona Gazette declared that Cochrane was ‘entitled to the admiration and gratitude of this country from the first moment of its political resurrection’ (cited in Thomas, p. 142). Later in the siege, he led his crew out on a sortie to attack French lines, and then, in a display of self-command that his midshipman Thomas Marryat experienced at first hand, ordered his men to run into the castle, which they instantly obeyed; while he himself walked leisurely along through a shower of musket-balls from those cursed Swiss dogs, whom I most fervently wished at the devil, because, as an aide-de-camp, I felt bound in honour as well as duty to walk by the side of my captain, fully expecting every moment that a rifle-ball would have hit me where I should have been ashamed to show the scar. I thought this funeral pace, after the funeral was over, confounded nonsense; but my fire-eating captain never had run away from a Frenchman, and did not intend to begin then. I was behind him, making these reflections, and as the shot began to fly very thick, I stepped up alongside of him, and, by degrees, brought him between me and the fire. ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘as I am only a midshipman, I don't care so much about honour as you do; and, therefore, if it makes no difference to you, I'll take the liberty of getting under your lee.’ He laughed, and said, ‘I did not know you were here, for I meant you should have gone with the others: but, since you are out of your station, Mr Mildmay, I will make that use of you which you so ingeniously proposed to make of me. My life may be of some importance here; but yours very little, and another midshipman can be had from the ship only for asking: so just drop astern, if you please, and do duty as a breastwork for me!’ ‘Certainly, sir,’ said I, ‘by all means;’ and I took my station accordingly. ‘Now,’ said the captain, ‘if you are “doubled up,” I will take you on my shoulders!’ I expressed myself exceedingly obliged, not only for the honour he had conferred on me, but also for that which he intended; but hoped I should have no occasion to trouble him. Whether the enemy took pity on my youth and innocence, or whether they purposely missed us, I cannot say: I only know I was very happy when I found myself inside the castle with a whole skin.10

9

10

Cited in Donald Thomas, Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf (London: Cassell, 2001 (1978)), p. 143. Henceforth cited as Thomas. Marryat, The Naval Officer, or Scenes in the Life and Adventures of Frank Mildmay, 3 vols (London, 1829), chapter 7.

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The story comes from Marryat’s first novel Frank Mildmay, the appeal of which was, in part, that it was known to be based on real incidents. Thus Cochrane appeared to the public as a storybook character, larger than life — the brave, kindly, humorous captain who was a revered father-figure to his midshipmen. The book was a bestseller — as were Marryat’s later naval novels, in which Cochrane again appeared a heart-warming mixture of shrewdness, bravery, and cool tolerance of young men’s hotheaded mistakes. Cochrane himself waited till 1860 to add to the literature that made him a legend but included in his Autobiography of a Seaman a story that speaks of the strange mixture of cruelty and chivalry that close-quarters naval warfare produced: [Looking at the French retreating from the breach in the fort, Cochrane spied] the last man to quit the walls, and before he could do so, I had covered him with my musket. Finding escape impossible, he stood like a hero to receive the bullet, without condescending to lower his sword in token of surrender. I never saw a braver or a prouder man. Lowering my musket, I paid him the compliment of remarking, that so fine a fellow was not born to be shot down like a dog, and that, so far as I was concerned, he was at liberty to make the best of his way down the ladder; upon which intimation he bowed as politely as though on parade, and retired just as leisurely. (Autobiography, p. 183)

Cochrane then proudly noted a fact that the romanticising novels and excited press reports omitted — he had lost only three men in the fighting. Cochrane’s exploits came at a timely moment for the British public and it was, in part, for this reason that they made the war in Spain and Portugal a patriotic and glamorous cause. It had been as recently as the end of August that what most viewed as the shameful Convention of Cintra had been signed by Generals Sir Harry Burrard and Sir Hew Dalrymple. This treaty allowed a French army just defeated by the British to leave Portugal with all its equipment; it also permitted blockaded enemy ships to return to their home port. Reaction at home was incredulous disappointment: the Convention seemed the lamest example yet of a series of military bungles committed by senior officers, many of them linked to the governing ministry. For liberals and radicals, disappointment was fused with righteous anger: Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, for example, had endured for years Tory smears that they were unpatriotic fellow-travellers with the revolutionary French. Any criticism of the ministry’s actions was met with slurs of Jacobinism; now, however, the Tory ministry’s favoured generals had let the beaten French go free to attack the oppressed Portuguese and Spanish another day. Southey, who had lived in Portugal, called passionately for Britain to assist the popular resistance in Iberia and renew the attack on France. Wordsworth attacked the

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Convention’s ‘moral depravity’ and urged Britons to welcome the ‘golden opportunities’ of supporting Iberia’s ‘new-born spirit of resistance’.11 Even years later, Cintra was still a rallying point for British radicals: Byron, for instance, wrote in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ‘folks in office at the mention fret, | And fain would blush, if blush they could, for shame. | How will posterity the deed proclaim!’.12 All sought to turn the tables on the establishment and to demonstrate their patriotism by expressing British solidarity with the Iberian popular resistance to arbitrary government. By 1810 Southey, Walter Scott and their friend Walter Savage Landor had each begun a major poem based on the medieval Spanish ruler Roderick who fought the invading Moors: the resultant works, reviewers saw, demonstrated ‘enthusiasm [...] in favour of Spanish liberty’ and sought the revival of ‘the chivalrous spirit’.13 Southey then took the opportunity to define that spirit for his own age, writing a popular Life of Nelson (1813) that made the dead admiral a paragon of dutifulness, self-sacrifice, daring, and honour. To such men, then, Cochrane should have been exactly the warrior they were seeking, a hero to redeem the shame of Cintra and vindicate British courage and dedication to liberty. He had all the credentials to become the living embodiment of what Nelson had been made to symbolize. An 1807 portait shows him in heroic and Nelson-esque pose, one hand inside his naval jacket. The difficulty for Cochrane was that he was alive. Nelson’s death let him be portrayed as a martyr; it also allowed his faults to be conveniently glossed-over. Southey’s biography said little about the Admiral’s scandalous menage-a-trois with his mistress Emma Hamilton and her elderly husband, although before Trafalgar it had been so notorious that polite society would not openly associate with Nelson. Cochrane had no sexual notoriety in his past, but there was nevertheless an awkward matter that would prevent his easy lionization and in the end lead him towards South America. That awkward matter was his forthright, noisy and implacable radicalism which had begun when Cochrane found to his outrage that the prize money he and his crew should have received for capturing enemy vessels was dissipated in 11

12 13

William Wordsworth, ‘The Convention of Cintra’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W.J.B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974), I, 197; citations given by line numbers from this edition: ‘moral depravity’, line 1707; ‘golden opportunities’, lines 3071-72; ‘spirit of resistance’, lines 159-60. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18), I.xxvi.353-55. From reviews of Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814) — ‘Spanish liberty’: Monthly Review, 86 (1815), 225-40; ‘chivalrous spirit’: British Critic, 2 (1815), 353-89. Both cited in Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Lionel Madden (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 176 and 184. Scott’s poem was The Vision of Don Roderick (1811); Landor’s Count Julian (1812).

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payments to corrupt naval officials. Prize money was sailors’ main source of income: the corruption led Cochrane to criticise his superiors, many of them men who themselves benefited from improper diversion of naval funds. These men then blocked his promotion and that of officers who had fought bravely under his command, leading Cochrane to make further criticism, at first via the press, and then in parliament, of which he became a member in 1806 by tricking the corrupt electorate of Honiton into voting for him without paying them the expected bribes. He later stood for the free seat of Westminster, where the electorate were not bribeable. His campaigning, however, involved him in partisan controversy and indecorous soliciting of votes. In the face of this, a straightforward public image as a heroic naval officer could not survive uncontested: Gillray caricatured him satirically climbing the greasy pole/poll to parliament. As an MP, Cochrane lost control of his patriotic reputation and became snared, despite himself, in procedural manoeuvres designed to frustrate his arguments. He had a single triumph: to dramatise the extent of naval corruption he went in 1812 to Malta, retrieved evidence of embezzlement of prize money, got himself imprisoned, escaped, and returned to the House to unroll, along the floor between the sitting MPs, a bill of legal fees that stretched from one end of the chamber to the other. The bill had been accumulated by a single official who illegally held all the prize-court posts simultaneously, and who charged for talking and writing — to himself. The charges were deducted from the prize money, leaving nothing for the sailors who had captured the enemy ship. The House was amazed and amused by Cochrane’s stunt. It was less willing to take any wholesale action. To criticise corruption in a far-away minor outpost was one thing; to attack it at home was another, but Cochrane did just that, joining the small group of radical MPs in questioning corruption and patronage not only in the navy, but in government too. This struck at the heart of the system by which the ministry maintained itself in power: most MPs were themselves the beneficiaries of patronage, and the ministry bought their votes by creating sinecures to be given to their relatives and friends. Cochrane did not just speak in the abstract; he named the names of the powerful families who awarded their friends and dependents pensions vastly in excess of the paltry amounts doled out to military heroes wounded in battle: ‘I find upon examination that the Wellesleys receive from the public £34,729’, he said, ‘a sum equal to 426 pairs of lieutenants’ legs, calculated at the rate of allowance of Lieutenant Chambers’s legs’ (cited in Thomas, pp. 210-11). MPs laughed at this, but it made Cochrane enemies in high places — and the Wellesley family’s placeman MP warned him to stick to sailing.

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Cochrane, however, by now a vehement critic of his admiralty superiors, turned down further naval command in the Mediterranean. Although his speeches made Cochrane popular outside parliament, they did so only with fellow-radicals and those who had no stake in the system — mostly those, therefore, who were too poor to have a vote. His calls for universal suffrage and annual parliaments, meanwhile, meant that he shared the agenda of extra-parliamentary radicals whom the comfortably-off suspected of trying to foment a labouring-class revolution, a revolution that, as unemployment and poverty spiralled in the post-1815 recession, seemed imminent. In 1810, indeed, Cochrane had come very near to initiating violent resistance against the state when parliament voted to have his friend, the radical leader Sir Francis Burdett, imprisoned. Burdett had simply complained in the press that parliament had been acting arbitrarily by imprisoning radicals who had criticised it for holding in secret an investigation into the latest military disaster. Refusing to accept press criticism as legal, parliament prepared to send officers to arrest Burdett at his Piccadilly home. A outraged crowd gathered and smashed ministers’ houses; the cavalry was mustered and charged; the crowd fought back by erecting barriers and pelting the horsemen with refuse. Cochrane, meanwhile, arrived at Burdett’s residence with a barrel of gunpowder, ready to lay mines and booby-traps as he had at Rosas two years before. He was prepared to blow the arresting officers and supporting troops sky-high, only for a question from labouring-class politician Francis Place to concentrate minds: ‘It will be easy enough to clear the hall of constables and soldiers, to drive them into the street or to destroy them, but are you prepared to take the next step and to go on?’ (cited in Thomas, p. 208). They were not: Burdett submitted to arrest and avoided setting London on fire. As a radical MP as well as a bold captain, Cochrane was too controversial a figure to be canonised by those seeking to glorify Britishness. His actions suggested that Britishness was — among its governing classes — a matter of corruption, self-interest and shame rather than liberty and independence. Even many of those who privately agreed with this suggestion were still opposed to him, viewing the existing system of governance as the only bulwark against revolutionary anarchy. Southey, for instance, though he eulogised Nelson and longed for heroes to defeat Napoleon in Spain, now abandoned his radicalism and supported the ministry. Emboldened by support of this kind, the establishment found an occasion to crush Cochrane, just as it would many radicals in the post-Waterloo years. The occasion was presented to them by the greed of Cochrane’s uncle, who in 1814 tricked the Stock Exchange into believing that Napoleon had

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been defeated and killed. Share prices rose before the falsity of the information was discovered and a killing was made in stock held by, among many others, Cochrane. He was arrested and, on flimsy evidence, convicted after a biased trial held before Lord Ellenborough, who was widely suspected of being the ministry’s henchman. He was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and to stand in the pillory for an hour. Although the pillory was remitted for fear that so degrading a punishment would provoke a riot in his favour, Cochrane was dismissed from the navy, expelled from parliament and his honours as a member of the aristocracy were ritually stripped from him. He was incarcerated in King’s Bench Prison. What hurt Cochrane most, apart from the injustice of the proceedings, was the loss of his reputation. From now on, he would embark on a struggle to vindicate his innocence, taking a care he had never before shown to shape his public image. He could count on popular sympathy: the electors of Westminster promptly re-elected him to the House. Cochrane, knowing that MPs were not liable to imprisonment for such an offence as his, regarded his detention as illegal and promptly escaped, using a smuggled-in rope. He then took his place in the House, only to be arrested and removed, struggling, from the chamber and returned to jail. Once released from serving his time, Cochrane became a more vociferous radical than ever, a sharp critic of the Lords whose answer to widespread poverty was to suspend habeas corpus and to give a few hundred pounds, from the thousands they annually received from the ministry, to charities devoted to poor relief. *********** In 1818, even as he continued to pressure the government to meet the people’s needs, Cochrane was considering an offer. It came from Don José Alvarez, the London emissary of Chile, a new country that had declared, but not yet achieved, independence from Spain. The offer was simple: the wouldbe state wanted Cochrane to command its navy. Cochrane, needing money and supporting liberal causes, accepted. By the time he did so, the liberation struggle in South America was suffering from news fatigue in Britain. This was a serious matter: it had always been in Britain that the revolutionaries had met and gathered money, supplies and soldiers. Miranda and his successors needed British loans, British guns and British expertise. But the early promise of glorious liberation from Spanish grasp had been blighted. In 1806-7 the British had briefly taken Buenos Aires from the Spanish, only to be ignominiously defeated by the townspeople when it became clear they offered not

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independence but British rule. The military disaster became a national embarrassment, and the general, John Whitelocke, was court-martialled on his return home. Further disappointment followed in 1812, when Miranda was betrayed and captured by the Spanish. The hero of so many liberal Britons ended his days rotting in Cadiz jail. And while matters in Chile seemed more promising, the situation was far from decided. In September 1810 Creoles in Santiago had announced that they would govern Chile until Spain’s deposed King was restored. Although they proclaimed loyalty to Ferdinand, they effectively became an independent government, opening the country to free trade, to the satisfaction of British merchants. Self-government did not bring peace, however, for the Creoles soon divided over whether they should pursue complete independence and republican status, or whether they should maintain their affiliation to the monarch. The dictatorial rule of José Miguel Carrera Verdugo (president, 1812-13), was opposed by the ‘liberal’ faction led by Bernardo O’Higgins, who had been educated in Britain and, in 1798, radicalised there by Miranda fresh from revolutionary Paris. Meanwhile, forces loyal to the Spanish crown continued to fight the liberators. In October 1814 a Spanish army from Peru defeated the Chilean army, forcing O’Higgins to flee across the Andes to Argentina. It was there that he joined forces with José de San Martin, who had fought against Napoleon in the Peninsula but had resigned from Spanish service, gone to London and met would-be liberators of South America. As an experienced officer, San Martin was welcomed by the revolutionaries. He arrived in Buenos Aires and set about training and supplying an army capable of crossing the Andes and retaking Chile, and then wresting Peru from royalist control. This attack, however, did not commence until 1817; thus, when Alvarez hired Cochrane to lead the Chilean fleet, the situation was stalled, complex, and uncertain, with independence a fragile and strife-ridden halfachievement threatened by violence from within and reconquest from without. One factor stood in the revolutionaries’ favour. With the defeat of Napoleon, thousands of British soldiers and sailors found themselves unemployed. They proved eager to sign up for a new war. Many of the ships in Cochrane’s Chilean fleet would be officered by British mercenaries; Simon Bolívar, meanwhile, recruited a British Legion that comprised British soldiers who were commanded by British officers, equipped by British contractors, and paid from loans raised from British financiers. These men, like Cochrane, were veterans of the Peninsula who had fought alongside the Spanish. Now they would fight against them. It seemed that South American revolution would depend on the very soldiers and sailors who had defeated revolutionary France in Europe. Predictably, the British government refused

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to assist and the government press abused the mercenaries: ‘the sordid views of the Cochranes and M’Gregors’, wrote The Quarterly Review, ‘can deceive no one; their sole object is plunder’.14 Abuse of this kind was no surprise to Cochrane and it did not reflect public feeling towards him. More typical was the comment in Blackwoods Magazine that perhaps such ‘strongly constituted and unquiet minds’ as that of Cochrane might be necessary to help the creoles break their bonds to ‘one of the worst governments that ever oppressed and degraded the human race’.15 Cochrane was intensely newsworthy and throughout his South American campaigns a stream of reports in magazines, journals, memoirs and travelnarratives would keep Britons informed of his exploits. Cochrane now took steps to influence this stream of information when he could: he had a reputation to restore. In consequence, the revolutionary battles impinged on Britons’ consciousness with a degree of immediacy and personality never seen before. Part of the public interest stemmed from Cochrane’s decision to take his wife and children with him, a step that involved them in the sort of adventures usually found only within the pages of Gothic romances. It had, however, been from the start a marriage from a romantic novel: Cochrane himself declared ‘my life has been one of the most romantic on record, and the circumstances of my marriage are not the least so’ (Autobiography, p. 316). He had met Katherine Barnes in 1812, the orphan child of a Spanish dancer and an English father. Attracted by her luxuriant dark hair and pale complexion, Cochrane found that their marriage was forbidden, absurdly enough, not by her guardian but by his uncle, who threatened to disinherit him. Refusing to marry his uncle’s choice of bride, Cochrane moved before Kitty could be put beyond his reach. The couple drove hard for Scotland one night in August and went through a civil marriage there in secret. He was thirty-seven, she sixteen. Now, as departure for South America loomed, Kitty’s guardian insisted they marry again, in the Anglican Church (they would marry for a third time in the Church of Scotland in 1825). They then set sail, accompanied by their five year-old son Tom, arriving in Chile on 28 November. By this time, Cochrane had internalised a sense of the way he must appear in order to live up the role of naval hero — the role for which the Chileans had hired him. He attended a Valparaiso banquet on St Andrews Day 1819 in the full tartan plaid of a Highland chief, like a character from one of Ossian’s poems or

14

15

The remarks appeared in a review of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative. Quarterly Review, 21 (1819), 320-52. Blackwoods Magazine, 1 (April, 1817), 100.

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Scott’s romances. Details of the occasion were relayed to Britain in the magazines, as was news of all Cochrane’s actions.16 And those actions were, as they had been in European waters, astonishing. In February 1820, with a tiny force of half-trained men and a leaky ship, he stormed the supposedly impregnable port of Valdivia. The exploit was described in detail by the widow of an English officer, Maria Graham, who had come to know Cochrane.17 Graham gave a vivid insider’s history of the Chilean independence war, helped by the fact that Cochrane, appreciating the need to control his public image back home, let her publish his despatches and private letters to the revolutionary leaders. Her verdict on the Valdivia attack firmly reinstated Cochrane as one of Britain’s great naval heroes: This action is perhaps one of the most daring and successful on record, and done, like every thing Lord Cochrane had performed, for the use of the thing, and not for the display of his own courage or talent; by it, the enemy was deprived of his last hold of Chile, and what is of still greater consequence, the Chilenos learned to place confidence in themselves and their officers, and to have the moral as well as the physical courage necessary for all great achievements.18

In November, Cochrane landed San Martin’s soldiers near Lima, expecting them to make a final assault on the last bastion of Spanish power in Chile. Instead, San Martin waited, preserving his army to use in the power struggle he expected to follow independence. Cochrane, frustrated by the general’s caution, decided to hasten matters. What he then did was described to the British public by the British naval captain, Basil Hall, in a narrative that, like Graham’s, benefited from Cochrane’s private papers: Cochrane, with part of his squadron, anchored in the outer Roads of Callao, the sea-port of Lima. The inner harbour is guarded by an extensive system of batteries, admirably constructed, and bearing the general name of the Castle of Callao. The merchant-ships, as well as the men-of-war, consisting, at that time, of the Esmeralda, a large 40 gun frigate, and two sloops of war, were moored under the guns of the castle, within a semicircle of fourteen gun-boats, and a boom made of spars chained together. Lord Cochrane having previously reconnoitred these formidable defences, in person, undertook, on the night of the 5th of 16

17

18

Cochrane’s gala reception on arrival in Chile was, for example, noted in ‘Abstract of Foreign Occurrences’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 89.1 (March, 1819), 268. For details of Graham’s remarkable career as a traveller, scientific observer and writer, see The Maria Graham Project, ed. by Carl Thompson and Betty Hagglund. Nottingham Trent University [accessed 6 January 2009]. Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, during the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil, in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824), pp. 58-59. Henceforth cited as Graham.

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November, the desperate enterprise of cutting out the Spanish frigate, although known to be fully prepared for an attack. He proceeded in fourteen boats, containing 240 men, all volunteers from the different ships of the squadron, in two divisions, one under the immediate orders of Captain Crosbie, the other under Captain Guise, both commanding ships of the squadron. At midnight, the boats having forced their way across the boom, Lord Cochrane, who was leading, rowed alongside the first gun-boat, and, taking the officer by surprise, proposed to him, with a pistol at his head, the alternative of ‘Silence or death!’ no reply was made, the boats pushed on unobserved, and Lord Cochrane mounting the Esmeralda's side, gave the first alarm. The sentinel on the gangway levelled his piece and fired, but was instantly cut down by the coxswain, and his Lordship, though wounded in the thigh, at the same moment stepped on the deck. The frigate being boarded with no less gallantry, on the opposite side, by Captain Guise, who met Lord Cochrane midway on the quarter-deck, and by Captain Crosbie, the after part of the ship was carried, sword in hand. The Spaniards rallied on the forecastle, where they made a desperate resistance, till overpowered by a fresh party of seamen and marines, headed by Lord Cochrane. A gallant stand was again made for some time on the main-deck, but before one o’clock the ship was captured, her cables cut, and she was steered triumphantly out of the harbour, under the fire of the whole of the north face of the castle. […] This loss was a death-blow to the Spanish naval force in that quarter of the world; for, although there were still two Spanish frigates and some smaller vessels in the Pacific, they never afterwards ventured to show themselves, but left Lord Cochrane undisputed master of the coast. The skill and gallantry displayed by Lord Cochrane, both in planning and in conducting this astonishing enterprise, are so peculiarly his own, and so much in character with the great deeds of his early life, that a copy of his instructions for the action, and his subsequent dispatch, will be read with much interest.19

In Spanish eyes, Cochrane was now ‘el diablo’, a name that echoed the one they still gave to his port-raiding predecessor Sir Francis Drake — ‘el dracone’.20 Cochrane’s public relations campaign then spread at home his fearsome reputation as the hammer of Spanish despotism: after his taking of Valdivia was reported in Britain, the Chileans were able to float a loan of £1 million in London to finance their war. With reports of Valdivia and the Esmeralda in the newspapers and journals, British uncertainty about the revolution’s success and its leaders’ reliability dissipated: the campaign seemed to be the hands of a Cochrane who was still as brilliant as they remembered him to have been ten years before.21 19

20 21

Basil Hall, Extracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1824), II, pp. 74-75. Cited in Thomas, p. 251. The Annual Register for the Year 1819, 61 (1820), p. 241 described Cochrane’s attacks and included the text of Cochrane’s blockade proclamation given in ‘Appendix to the Chronicle’, Annual Register for the Year 1819, 61 (1820), p. 154. The taking of Lima’s port, Callao was reported in ‘Abstract of Foreign Occurrences’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 90. 2 (April, 1820),

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The press reports also rehabilitated Cochrane’s character: now, far from the divided politics of home, Cochrane could be admired again, despite the fact that he was fighting for a cause his country refused to recognise. Graham made the case, invoking the great warriors of the national bard, Shakespeare, to exalt Cochrane to the status of truly disinterested hero: Coriolanus, when his country was ungrateful, went and commanded the armies of her enemies and revenged himself. Alcibiades fled to a tyrant’s court, and disgraced the land he had left by his excesses; and most of those who have been obliged to ‘teach them other tongues, and to become no strangers to strange eyes,’ have followed either the one example or the other. But Lord Cochrane, when he left his beloved home, refused the splendid offers of a court, because he could not fight against the principles of his country, but went to a remote and feeble nation and employed his talents in assisting the sacred cause of national independence. And though, as all things sublunary are imperfect, Chile is still far from enjoying all the advantages that she should derive from that blessing for which he fought, — his part was done: the fleets of the oppressors were driven from the shores of the Pacific; and some principles established, and some seeds of future good were sown, that will immortalise him as a benefactor to mankind as well as a hero — things too often, alas! so widely different. (Graham, p. 73)

Such texts redeemed Cochrane’s reputation: the criminal who had been stripped of his parliamentary seat, military rank and aristocratic title was to be celebrated by all but the creatures of the Tory ministry (which would, however, have to recognise the fact of Chilean independence in 1825). In parliament the liberal MP Sir James Mackintosh declared: Lord Cochrane is such a miracle of nautical skill and courage; his cause of banishment from his country is so lamentable — his adventures have been so romantic — and his achievements so splendid, that no Englishman can read them without pride, that such things have been done by his countryman; and without solemn concern that such talents and genius should be lost to the land that gave them birth. (cited in Thomas, p. 262)

Mackintosh did not know that Cochrane planned to rescue Napoleon from exile on St Helena, an astonishing scheme that would have involved a Briton attacking British territory, fighting British troops and, if successful, destroying twenty years of British policy by restoring Napoleon to power — as the Emperor of South America. Napoleon’s death ensured that the plan came to nothing, and it was not he, but San Martin, O’Higgins and Bolívar who took power in Spain’s former colonies.

p. 364; ‘Political Events: Foreign States’, New Monthly Magazine, 3 (April, 1821), p. 160. The capture of Valdivia was covered, too, in ‘Abstract of Foreign Occurrences’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 90. 2 (July, 1820), p. 76.

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Bolívar never met Cochrane; San Martin and O’Higgins, however, had many encounters with the Admiral whom Chile had hired. Indeed, one main purpose of Cochrane’s manipulation of the British press was to give his view of the leading revolutionary leaders. In the case of San Martin, this view was deeply critical. He released to Graham, to Hall and to W. B. Stevenson selfjustifying details of his clashes with the General, whom he accused of betraying Chile in order to further his own ambition to become despotic ruler of Peru.22 San Martin, these narratives revealed, declared himself ‘Protector of Peru’, using this as a pretext (since he was no longer leader of Chile) to avoid paying the monies promised to Cochrane’s crews. Cochrane responded by capturing the boat being used to transport treasure for San Martin and distributing that treasure as payment of his men. Cochrane, disgusted and unrewarded, then left the service of Chile, while San Martin found his ambitions thwarted by Bolívar and retired to Argentina. While Cochrane had been occupied with destroying Spanish naval power, Kitty had had adventures of her own. These made her a romantic heroine in the eyes of Walter Scott and the British public (to whom she seemed rather like one of Scott’s own heroines). Cochrane published the details himself, in typically understated prose: During my absence Lady Cochrane chiefly resided at Valparaiso, where she diligently employed herself in promoting objects essential to the welfare of the squadron; after a time removing to a delightful country house at Quillota, where her life was endangered by a ruffian in the interest of the Spanish faction. This man, having gained admission to her private apartment, threatened her with instant death if she would not divulge the secret orders which had been given to me. On her declaring firmly that she would not divulge anything, a struggle took place for a paper which she picked off a table; and before her attendants could come to her assistance she received a severe cut from a stiletto. The assassin was seized, condemned, and ordered for execution, without the last offices of the Catholic religion. In the dead of the night preceding the day fixed for his execution, Lady Cochrane was awoke by loud lamentations beneath her window. On sending to ascertain the cause, the wretched wife of the criminal was found imploring her Ladyship’s intercession that her husband should not be deprived of the benefits of confession and absolution. Forgiving the atrocity of the act, Lady Cochrane, on the following morning used all her influence with the authorities, not for this alone, but to save the man’s life, and at length wrung from them a reluctant consent to commute his punishment to banishment for life.23

22

23

See W. B. Stevenson, A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (London: Hurst, Robinson & Co., 1825). Thomas Cochrane, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, 2 vols. (London: James Ridgway, 1859), I, p. 22. Henceforth cited as Narrative.

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The lady menaced in her bedroom; her strength of mind and body; her mercifulness: this sensational story was calculated to make her a romantic heroine, and its telling may have been inflected by the romantic texts that had already reached South America when the events occurred. Certainly Maria Graham was reading Byron while in Chile, and Scott when living near the Cochranes in Brazil. Cochrane had further stories to tell of his wife’s endurance of hardship and active role in the revolution: Soon after my departure for Peru, Lady Cochrane undertook a journey across the Cordillera, to Mendoza, the passes being, at that season, often blocked up with snow. Having been entrusted with some despatches of importance, she pushed on rapidly, and on the 12th of October arrived at the celebrated Ponte del Inca, 15,000 feet above the level of the sea. Here the snow had increased to such an extent as to render farther progress impossible, and her ladyship was obliged to remain at a Casucha, or strong house, built above the snow for the safety of travellers; the intense cold arising from the rarity of the atmosphere, and the absence of all comfort — there being no better couch than a dried bullock’s hide — producing a degree of suffering which few ladies would be willing to encounter. Whilst proceeding on her mule up a precipitous path in the vicinity, a Royalist, who had intruded himself on the party, rode up in an opposite direction and disputed the path with her, at a place where the slightest false step would have precipitated her into the abyss below. One of her attendants, a tried and devoted soldier, named Pedro Flores, seeing the movement, and guessing the man’s intention, galloped up to him at a critical moment, striking him a violent blow across the face, and thus arresting his murderous design. The ruffian finding himself vigorously attacked, made off, without resenting the blow, and so, no doubt, another premeditated attempt on Lady Cochrane’s life was averted. (Narrative, I, 22)

Few British gentlewomen had crossed the Andes at all, let alone done so carrying military despatches. Many, perhaps, confined by the roles prescribed them in polite society, wanted to imagine themselves doing so and being saved by the chivalrous Pedro. Later, Pedro came to the rescue again when, her child ill, Lady Cochrane was forced to flee renegade royalists: information was received that the Royalists, having gained intelligence that she was at Quilca, had determined to seize her and her infant that very evening, and to detain them as hostages. This intelligence arrived just as a large party was assembled in the ball-room, when, with a decision which is one of her chief characteristics, Lady Cochrane ordered a palanquin — presented to her by the Marquis of Torre Tagle — to be got ready instantly, and placing the child and its nurse in it, she despatched them under the protection of a guard. Leaving the ball-room secretly, she changed her dress, immediately following on horseback with relays of her best horses. Travelling all night and the following day without intermission, the party came to one of those swollen torrents which can only be crossed by a frail bridge made of cane-rope, a proceeding of extreme danger to those who are not well accustomed to the motion produced by its elasticity. Whilst the party was debating as to how to get the palanquin over, the sound

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of a Royalist bugle was heard close at hand. Lady Cochrane sprang to the palanquin, and taking out her suffering infant, rushed on to the bridge, but when near the centre, the vibration became so great that she was compelled to lie down, pressing the child to her bosom — being thus suspended over the foaming torrent beneath, whilst in its state of vibration no one could venture on the bridge. In this perilous situation, Pedro, the faithful soldier of whom mention has been previously made, seeing the imminent danger of her Ladyship, begged of her to lie still, and as the vibration ceased, crept on his hands and knees towards her Ladyship, taking from her the child, and imploring her to remain motionless, when he would bring her over in the same way; but no sooner had he taken the child, than she followed, and happily succeeded in crossing, when the ropes being cut, the torrent was interposed between her and her pursuers. (Narrative, I, 115-17)

Lady Cochrane, in her husband’s narrative, showed a similar brave decisiveness at sea: Having reached the coast in safety, Lady Cochrane came down to me at Callao. Whilst she was on board, I received private information that a ship of war laden with treasure was about to make her escape in the night. There was no time to be lost, as the enemy’s vessel was such an excellent sailer that, if once under weigh, beyond the reach of shot, there was no chance of capturing her. I therefore determined to attack her, so that Lady Cochrane had only escaped one peril ashore to be exposed to another afloat. Having beat to quarters, we opened fire upon the treasure-ship and other hostile vessels in the anchorage, the batteries and gun-boats returning our fire, Lady Cochrane remaining on deck during the conflict. Seeing a gunner hesitate to fire his gun, close to which she was standing, and imagining that his hesitation from her proximity might, if observed, expose him to punishment, she seized the man’s arm, and directing the match fired the gun. The effort was, however, too much for her, as she immediately fainted, and was carried below. The treasure-vessel having been crippled, and the gun-boats beaten off, we left off firing and returned to our former anchorage, Lady Cochrane again coming on deck. As soon as the sails were furled, the men in the tops, and the whole crew on deck, no doubt by preconcerted arrangement, spontaneously burst forth with the inspiring strains of their national anthem, some poet amongst them having extemporized an alteration of the words into a prayer for the blessing of Divine providence on me and my devoted wife; the effect of this unexpected mark of attachment from five hundred manly voices being so overwhelming as to affect her Ladyship more than had the din of cannon. (Narrative, I, 117-18)

By portraying his wife in novelistic terms, Cochrane turned the revolution, and his involvement in it, from a controversial affair of argument, in-fighting, betrayal and brutality (as well as martial valour) to one of unpolitical heroic romance. In so doing, however, he may have simply been describing a role Kitty played out quite deliberately. Her own words suggest her embrace of Romantic heroism: ‘I have stood upon the battle deck. I have seen the men fall. I have raised them. I have fired a gun to save the life of a man for the

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honour of my husband, and would do it again.’24 And the memoirs of General Miller, mercenary commander of Chilean troops, suggest she acted as she spoke: The sudden appearance of youth and beauty, on a fiery horse, managed with skill and elegance, absolutely electrified the men, who had never before seen an English lady: qué hermosa! qué graciosa! qué Linda! qué guapa! qué airosa! es un ángel del cielo! were exclamations that escaped from one end of the line to the other. Her ladyship turned her sparkling eyes towards the line, and bowed graciously. The troops could no longer confine their expressions of admiration to half-suppressed interjections; loud vivas burst from officers as well as men. Lady Cochrane smiled her acknowledgements and cantered off the ground with the grace of a fairy.25

Miller’s narrative was widely reviewed in Britain, as were Hall’s and Graham’s.26 Together, they ensured that the Cochranes were lauded on the pages of magazines and journals read by thousands. The publicity continued during the couple’s brilliant years in Brazil, where they moved in 1823 when Cochrane took command of the navy of the independence forces. Graham moved with them, and published her Journal of a voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During ... the Years 1821-1823 in 1824, detailing Cochrane’s brilliant campaign in which, by deceptive shows of force which made his ships seem more dangerous than they actually were, and by bluff, he persuaded the Portuguese army in Bahia to embark for Maranham, captured some of the escaping convoy although it was defended by Portuguese ships of greater power than his own, scattered more of it across the Atlantic, then sailed ahead of the remnant, and threatened Maranham with bombardment.27 It surrendered before the remnant convoy arrived. Repeating the bluff, he forced the surrender of Para, thus liberating the north of the country from royalist forces within a few months. According to Graham, the Brazilians appreciated the fact that they had acquired a 24

25

26

27

House of Lords Sessions Papers: Dundonald Peerage Claim, 1861-63, pp. 58-60. Cited in Thomas, p. 203. John Miller (ed.), Memoirs of General Miller, in the Service of the Republic of Peru, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Rees et al, 1828), vol. I, p. 298. The Edinburgh Review, 40 (1824), 31-43, reported Hall’s interviews with San Martin and Cochrane. Other reviews of Hall’s Extracts from a Journal were carried in the New Monthly Magazine, 12 (June, 1824), 268-70, the Monthly Review (January, 1825), 51-60, the Mechanics Magazine (Saturday, 29 May, 1824), 125-27. Graham’s Journal of a Residence was reviewed in the Monthly Review (February, 1825), 189-200 and the Quarterly Review, 30 (January, 1824), 441-47. The Quarterly Review, 38 (1828), 448-88 included a long review of the Memoirs of General Miller. Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green; & J. Murray, 1824).

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‘treasure’ and a ‘great man’ in Cochrane: the province of Maranham was essential to independence, being the area in which foreign trade was transacted.28 Nonetheless, some of the factions that began to jostle for power in the independent country regarded him with suspicion: he foiled an attempt to arrest him at his house only by riding through the night to escape. As in Chile, Cochrane found that the monies owed his crews were left unpaid; so, his naval services largely superfluous now victory was won, he took his flagship ‘for repairs’ across the Atlantic to Britain. His campaigns in South America were done. The effects of those campaigns were far from over. South America was now firmly in Britons’ minds as a place where their countrymen could achieve astonishing results. It was a tantalising zone of possibility, cleared of its colonial masters, and ripe for British enterprise. Merchants and manufacturers had, since the turn of the century, been promoting independence so as to open South American markets.29 Now that Cochrane had helped bring independence about in a blaze of publicity not only merchants and manufacturers, but also the general public, hoped to cash in. His taking of Valdivia had helped Chile float a loan with London bankers. Similarly, the clearing of the Spanish from Peru and the Portuguese from Brazil led to an investment boom, triggered by Britain’s recognition of the new republics’ statehood. ‘You cannot imagine,’ wrote Princess Lieven from London in early 1825, ‘how mad everyone here has gone over the companies in South America. Everybody, from the lady to the footman, is risking pin-money or wages in these enterprises. Huge fortunes have been made in a week. Shares in the gold-mines of the Real del Monte, bought at 70 pounds, were sold, a week later, for 1350 pounds’.30 Many of the companies in which Britons

28 29

30

Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, entry for 2 October 1823. Brazil was particularly eyed-up because, during the revolutionary years it already took 25% per cent more English merchandise than did all of Asia, half as much as did the United States at the British West Indies, and more than four-fifths of the total sent to South America. See Alan K. Manchester, British Preeminence in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), pp. 97-98. Discussions in periodicals included articles on Andrew Grant's ‘History of Brazil’, Monthly Review, 64 (January, 1811), 52-54; T. Aske's ‘A Commercial View and Geographical Sketch of the Brazils …’, Monthly Review, 70 (February, 1812), 219-21. For further detail about press reports on commercial prospects see Calvin Paul Jones, Spanish America in Selected British Periodicals, 1800-1830, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Kentucky, 1966. I am indebted to Jones’s information throughout my discussion of periodical responses to Cochrane’s South American activities. Princess Lieven to Metternich, 27 January 1825, The Private Letters of Princess Lieven to Prince Metternich, ed. by P. Quennell (London: Murray, 1948), p. 343.

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rushed to invest existed more on paper than on the ground. The Quarterly Review noted that it was only necessary to find out some shrewd, confident and bustling agent, generally in the person of an attorney, who gets together a president and chairman, (of rank and distinction if possible) with a dozen names of some notoriety, containing a considerable sprinkle of M.P.’s to act the part of directors; a banker, not difficult to be found; and an engineer, like a physician or a lawyer, ready to undertake any case, however desperate, and like them sure to derive individual profits from the undertaking.31

Not all were mere swindles: engineers (often ex-mercenary officers) were sent criss-crossing the Andes prospecting sites; miners were despatched from Cornwall; steam engines were lugged through the jungles. And though few of these ventures ever produced profits, the money spent in the mining regions set the post-colonial economies going. Whole towns were, while the ventures lasted, sustained on their income. As well as mining companies, firms were set up in things as diverse as pearl-fishing, dairying, canal-building and steamship transport. In total, 1824 and 1825 saw the foundation or projection of forty-six companies trading in South America. They wielded an authorized capital of £35 million. And the investment fever was not only in new British companies. A nominal sum of £17 million was invested in Spanish American government bonds in England during the years 1824-1825.32 Chile and Peru both issued bonds which were quickly snapped up; at the same time loans made in the forms of manufactures (metalware, military supplies, cotton goods) stimulated British industry: the average annual value of exports to South America doubled between 1818 and 1824. The speculative boom led to crash later in 1825 just as the Cochranes were returning home across the Atlantic; thereafter trade levelled off, though still at a level above that of pre-independence times. British money and British manufactures had followed British soldiers and sailors in bringing South American independence to dramatic fruition, and investment continued throughout the nineteenth century. 33 This could not have happened had 31 32

33

Quarterly Review, 31 (1825), 350. For statistics see J. Fred Rippy, British Investments in Latin America, 1822-1949 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), pp. 17-26, and Leland Hamilton Jenks, The Migration of British Capital to 1875 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), p. 44. My discussion of these economic trends and their reporting at the time is indebted to Jones, Spanish America in Selected British Periodicals. On the benefits accruing to Britain from post-colonial trade, see Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York and

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not Cochrane (and his romantic wife) made it, by their deeds and words, a thrilling part of the public’s cultural imaginary. Once back in Britain, the Cochranes took the public’s plaudits, the evening at the Edinburgh theatre being only one of many occasions on which the public congratulated them. It was, however, far too early for any official rehabilitation, and the government’s lawyer threatened to prosecute him under an Act making it illegal to serve in the forces of a country not recognised by Britain. And so Cochrane turned to a cause that his own South American career had helped make seem possible — the cause of winning Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. In 1823 Byron, himself the descendant of a famous naval captain and an admirer of Cochrane’s capture of the Esmeralda, imagined a revolution in Greece like that which had just occurred in South America:34 in that avenging clime Where Spain was once synonymous with crime, Where Cortes’ and Pizarro’s banner flew, The infant world redeems her name of ‘New.’ ’Tis the old aspiration breathed afresh, To kindle souls within degraded flesh, Such as repulsed the Persian from the shore Where Greece was — No! she still is Greece once more. One common cause makes myriads of one breast, Slaves of the East, or helots of the West: On Andes’ and on Athos’ peaks unfurled, The self-same standard streams o’er either world: The Athenian wears again Harmodius’ sword; The Chili chief abjures his foreign lord; The Spartan knows himself once more a Greek, Young Freedom plumes the crest of each cacique; Debating despots, hemmed on either shore, Shrink vainly from the roused Atlantic’s roar (Age of Bronze VI. 264-81)

If Byron’s words were stimulated by Cochrane’s achievements, Cochrane in turn set out to make those words come true. He accepted the command of the navy of the Greek revolutionaries. Byron himself joined the struggle as a soldier: Romantic liberalism was going into action for the

34

London: Monthly Review Press, 1973) and H. S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960) He jokily wished to emulate Cochrane’s cutting-out of the Esmeralda in his literary spat with Bowles. See his letter of 25 May 1821 to John Murray, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: Murray, 1973-82), VIII, p. 126.

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oldest and most romantic cause of all — for the ancient democracy, art, literature and culture for which Greece, in liberal minds, stood. As it turned out, Cochrane was able to achieve little with the Greek ships save bring the Royal Navy into the war: his old colleagues blew the Ottoman fleet to pieces at Navarino. But the eventual achievement of independence cemented his popular reputation. His heroic portrait was among those lithographed and sold as one of the liberators of Greece; simultaneously he featured in a popular broadside that urged the new king to pardon him: The contrast of kings! Charles the French Tyrant and William and Adelaide, England’s Hope and Glory Welcome’s sailor king and lauds Cochrane To honest British feeling, prone To cherish or forgive; Brave Wilson in his long lost rank He bids long honoured live! Nor Cochrane’s merits can forget, So long a brave Exile, — But will protest old Ocean’s sons The Bulwarks of our Isle!35

By the 1830s, Cochrane was regularly appearing in literature: ballads, poems and, above all, Marryat’s novels reinstated him in the pantheon of British naval heroes for a public that, post-Reform Act, wished to turn its back on the corruption and divisiveness of the Regency years. Retired from radical politics, he could safely be re-absorbed into the self-glorifying myth which bolstered national pride by claiming that duty, courage, love of liberty and victory in battle were essentially British characteristics. His own autobiographical writings helped the cause by recalling his great deeds to attention, even though they also aired his grievances again. Cochrane was not easily mollified, although in 1832 he was pardoned for the Stock Exchange ‘crime’ and reinstated in the navy list. Both he and Lady Cochrane outlived most of their enemies, and in 1847 the young Queen Victoria, who had grown up reading admiringly about Britain’s naval heroes, restored his knighthood. In the twentieth century, he continued to be a source of heroes in fiction: C. S. Forester would base a character on him in his Hornblower novels and Patrick O’Brien incorporate him into the exemplary Captain Jack Aubrey. In South America too, the further the controversies receded, the more easily Cochrane 35

J. Catnach, 2 Monmouth Court, London, n.d. Item L12 of the Catnach Broadside Collection, St Bride Print Library, Fleet St, London.

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could be revered as one of the national liberators. In Chile, streets are named after him and warships called Cochrane. Romantic nationalism remains alive and well, honouring an extraordinary man — and his wife — who shaped their lives by it and, in the process, reshaped it on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bibliography Cochrane, Thomas, Admiral Lord, The Autobiography of a Seaman (1860) (London: Chatham, 2000) ——, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, 2 vols. (London: James Ridgway, 1859) Ferns, H. S., Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960) Galeano, Eduardo, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1973) Graham, Maria, Journal of a Residence in Chile, during the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil, in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824) ——, Journal of a voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During ... the Years 1821-1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green; & J. Murray, 1824) Hall, Basil, Extracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1824) Harvey, Robert, Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain (London: Constable & Robinson, 2001) ——, Liberators: South America’s Savage Wars of Freedom 1810-30 (London: Robinson, 2002) Jenks, Leland Hamilton, The Migration of British Capital to 1875 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927) Jones, Calvin Paul, Spanish America in Selected British Periodicals, 18001830, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Kentucky, 1966 Leask, Nigel, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 17701840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

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Madden, Lionel, ed., Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) Manchester, Alan K., British Preeminence in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933) Marryat, The Naval Officer, or Scenes in the Life and Adventures of Frank Mildmay, 3 vols. (London, 1829) Miller, John, ed., Memoirs of General Miller, in the Service of the Republic of Peru, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Rees et al, 1828) Owen, W.J.B. and J. W. Smyser, eds., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) Rippy, J. Fred, British Investments in Latin America, 1822-1949 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959) Russell, Gillian, Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 17931815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) Stevenson, W.B., A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (London: Hurst, Robinson & Co., 1825) The Maria Graham Project, ed. by Carl Thompson and Betty Hagglund, University of Nottingham Trent [accessed 6 January 2009] Thomas, Donald, Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf (London: Cassell, 2001 (1978)

Alicia Laspra Rodríguez

Fictionalizing History: British War Literature and the Asturian Uprising of 1808 In May 1808, the members of a long-established institution, the Junta general of the Principality of Asturias, decided to declare war on Napoleon in a deprived though proud region on the Northern coast of Spain. This paper re-examines the impact of this unique initiative taken by the Asturian authorities in sending deputies to solicit the support of the British government in their contest against Napoleon. This initiative generated an unusual wealth of documents that I have analyzed elsewhere. The literary texts under consideration in this essay, from well-known authors such as Wordsworth and Byron and lesser-known writers such as John Agg and Terence Mahon Hughes, add to that documentary wealth. They also add to what we already know about the extent to which writers of the time found a source of inspiration in the Peninsular War. The lesser-known texts reviewed for this paper have been extracted from published primary sources, mainly kept in the British Library, and were written between 1808 and 1809. An 1847 text provides evidence of long-lasting influence on some British writers of the two historical events that marked Asturian heroic history. Writers revisited Asturias’ old glory in her rejection of the invading Moors in 720 in the light of the Napoleonic challenge of 1808. The mixture of myth and history, personified in the Asturian king Pelayo, protected by the Lady of the Cave (Covadonga), perfectly suits Romantic views of the new conflict on the basis of parallelism and fictionalisation.

The Peninsular War and War Literature The term ‘War Literature’ is often associated with the ‘war poets’ of the First World War and, to a lesser extent, with the writers of a later generation who recorded their experience of the Second World War and its aftermath.1 This does not imply, naturally, that War Literature is restricted to those specific conflicts. Other major wars like the English Civil War or the Spanish Civil War generated their own War Literature — in fact, it may be said that any major conflict will give rise to its own literature. In 2001, however, Ian Fletcher wrote that ‘the Peninsular War spawned a wealth of literature in the form of memoirs, diaries and letters but, unlike later wars, such as the Great

1

See John Anthony Cuddon, ‘War Literature,’ in Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 186. A number of anthologies have collected the most interesting writings of these authors and, lately, new perspectives on the topic have been offered by critics in gender studies.

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War of 1914-18, it never produced what we might now call “war poets”’.2 The argument that follows calls into question Fletcher’s statement. Before proceeding, it might be useful to distinguish several types of War Literature. The first type could be identified by the term ‘Patriotic Writing’. This includes texts by writers who record their own feelings and personal experiences about the conflict, often displaying patriotic and Romantic views. A second type might be termed ‘Wartime Propaganda’, referring to literature seen and used as a combat weapon, that is, as part of the general war effort. Not necessarily written by the protagonists themselves, but by sympathizers, government agents or hired authors, the main aim of wartime propaganda is to provide open support to one’s own cause and, eventually, to one’s allies. A third type might be finally identified as ‘Protest Writing’ and would comprise literary works by authors who write about their war experience with a predominantly negative attitude — that is, displaying various degrees of irony, disgust, anger or horror, often mixed with doses of grim humor. In the context of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, we find clear examples of the three types: patriotic writing, wartime propaganda, and protest writing. Wordsworth’s Peninsular War sonnets would find a place in the first group. Croker’s lengthy poem The Battle of Talavera (1809) and Walter Scott’s The Vision of Don Roderick (1811) illustrate the category of wartime propaganda. By contrast we have Coleridge’s poem Fears in Solitude (1798), Byron’s first Canto in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), and Anna Barbauld’s poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, also published in 1812, as clear examples of protest writing. Additionally, ‘War Literature’, whose specific types I have outlined briefly here, is not the same as ‘Literature about War’, which would cover writings produced in the aftermath of the conflict (when many witnesses are still alive), not necessarily authored by its protagonists, though often written on the basis of their remarks and information, and with a tendency towards elaborating and reflecting on the war, its causes and consequences. Some of the Peninsular War writing to be mentioned below (such as Iberia Won, published in 1846 by T.M. Hughes) belongs in this category.3 2

3

Ian Fletcher, ‘Introduction’, in Against All Hazards: Poems of the Peninsular War, ed. by Harry Turner (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2001), p. x. A final category, which falls outside the scope of this essay, could be termed ‘Historical Literature about War.’ This would deal with past or even remote conflicts, with a combination of conscientious artistry and a more or less faithful reconstruction of the historical past. C.S. Forester’s The Gun, a novel about the Peninsular War written in 1933, or the Sharpe series of novels, again mainly on the Peninsular War, published by Bernard

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Different episodes of the Peninsular War were recorded both by major and minor British literary authors in an unprecedented common effort to support the cause. The vast majority of poetic writing, as well as important prose works that resulted from this effort, may therefore be classified within wartime propaganda. Authors such as Sir Walter Scott, Felicia Hemans and Robert Southey, among others, interpreted war in a positive way, even as necessary in some cases.4 Poetry thus performed a major role in the mediation of the Peninsular War to the British public. Many works addressed a wide range of readers through a variety of forms, and the mediating role of the poet was generally assumed by the reading public.5

The Asturian Deputies in London, 1808 In May and June 1808 the Spanish rose against Napoleon, leading to the war known in Spain as ‘The War of Independence’. Starting with the Dos de Mayo uprising in Madrid, a state of open rebellion soon spread over most of Spain. The Asturian revolt (25 May) was among the first episodes that followed, and the General Junta of the Principality, which soon changed its composition and started calling itself Supreme Junta of Government, was actually the first official Spanish body to decide and implement a measure of such far-reaching consequences as to declare war on France. On May 30, 1808 a small party of Asturian deputies set sail for England from the port of Gijón.6 The representatives included a member of the local aristocracy, young Viscount Matarrosa, and two lecturers of the University of Oviedo, Andrés Ángel de la Vega and Fernando Álvarez de Miranda. Commissioned by the newly self-constituted Supreme Junta, their mission included

4

5

6

Cornwell over the last two decades, would be representative of Historical Literature about War, the same as the 2001 book of poems by H. Turner mentioned in note 2 above. The history of the ‘historical literature’ about the Peninsular War remains largely unwritten. Diego Saglia’s Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) analyzes different literary productions inspired by Spanish affairs during the Peninsular War. The ‘writer as mediator’ is a prime methodological concern in Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ‘Preface’, p. viii. This concern links with some of the basic tenets of New Historicism: namely, ‘the textuality of history, the historicity of texts’, as Stephen J. Grenblatt and Catherine Gallagher put it in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 172. For a revision of the way in which the whole affair affected that port, see Alicia Laspra Rodríguez, ‘De la hostilidad a la alianza: el puerto de Gijón y las relaciones asturbritánicas’ in Gijón, puerto anglosajón, ed. by Agustín Coletes Blanco (Oviedo: Nobel, 2005), pp. 55-77.

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informing the British authorities of the rebellions in Spain, and, above all, asking for help in the war effort against Napoleon. Deputies from the Galician and Andalusian provincial juntas would progressively join the Asturians in London from the end of June until the beginning of December, when Admiral Ruiz de Apodaca, formerly representing Seville, became the exclusive representative of a new body created for the whole country, the Central Junta. This substantial change put an end to the initial stage of the new Anglo-Spanish alliance, a period of six crucial months during which the provincial representatives, starting with the Asturians, had been the sole valid interlocutors between the Spanish patriot juntas and the British government — in particular the Foreign Secretary George Canning, but also the War Secretary Viscount Castlereagh and King George III himself, who received the deputies on September 28, 1808. As could be expected, the dramatic situation sketched above soon occasioned an unusual wealth of notes, letters, news bulletins and official documents of all kinds that were constantly exchanged between the Spanish representatives and the British government, or among different departments of the British government’s bodies, to which substantial numbers of parliamentary papers and records, newspaper articles and editorials, magazine essays, diary entries, and memoirs were soon added. The interest in Spanish affairs was so great that, in July 1808, The Times sent Henry Crabb Robinson to Corunna as one of the world’s first war correspondents.7

Asturias as a Source of Inspiration I have dealt elsewhere with important documentary evidence of the relationship established between the British government and the Asturian authorities and representatives which started in May-June 1808; such a unique Anglo-Asturian relation had the additional value of being the first episode in a long and complex relationship between Britain and Spain during the period 1808-1814. References to Asturias can also be found in literary texts by British authors that mention the special Anglo-Asturian relations of 1808. Following the classification put forward above, the first five would fall within the general category of War Literature, with four representatives of ‘wartime 7

Robinson’s reports and activities while in Spain have been thoroughly reviewed by Elías Durán de Porras, Galicia, The Times y la Guerra de la Independencia. Henry Crabb Robinson y la corresponsalía de The Times en A Coruña, 1808-1809 (A Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2008).

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propaganda’ and one of ‘protest writing’, and the last two from the category Literature about War. Authors include a mixture of well-known and lesserknown writers: John Agg, Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth and Henry G. Knight in the category of wartime propaganda, Lord Byron as a representative of protest writing, and Terence M. Hughes in connection with literature about war.8

Wartime Propaganda (1808-1809): John Agg, Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth, H. G. Knight In chronological order, the first token of Anglo-Asturian wartime propaganda is John Agg’s Dawn of Liberty on the Continent of Europe, a book published in 1808. Little is known about John Agg, probably a fictitious name, not granted an entry in the British Dictionary of National Biography. According to the American National Union Catalog, John Agg flourished around 1816. He often authored his books as ‘J. Agg’, or with a variety of synonyms that included ‘Jeremiah Juvenal’, ‘Peter Pindar’ or ‘Sentinel’.9 The British Library Catalogue includes 15 items by Agg, the earliest published being the book The Dawn of Liberty (1808) and the latest a History of Congress dated in 1834. John Agg — whoever that name stood for — was probably a Romantic spirit, and a follower and imitator of Lord Byron. The Dawn of Liberty itself strikes a very Byronic note in its defence of freedom against tyranny. Agg’s next works were Lord Byron’s Farewell to England (1816) and Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1817), both of which saw second editions. Agg’s earlier works also included historical romances Edwy and Elgiva (1811), The Royal Sufferer (1810), a satirical novel (1815), apocryphal memoirs titled The Book Itself (1813), and poems in The Ocean Harp (1819). John Agg, who apparently liked to toy with pseudonyms, apocrypha, suppositious works, etc., seems to have moved to the United States and become an American citizen, since his latter works include reports on the Constitution of the State of Pennsylvania (1837) and the already mentioned book on the US Congress, whose shortened title is History of

8

9

Naturally, not all British Romantic poets (Barbauld is an example) deal specifically with Asturias or the Asturian episode, but it will probably be difficult to find one that does not deal at all with Spain or the Peninsular War. Much work remains to be done in this field. Not to be confused with John Wolcot (1738-1819).

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Congress ... exhibiting a classification of the proceedings of the Senate and the House of Representatives (1834).10 The book which concerns us here is titled The Dawn of Liberty on the Continent of Europe; or, the Struggle of the Spanish Patriots for the Emancipation of their Country. Published in Bristol by the author, sometime between the beginning of July and the end of December, 1808, it is an 89page octavo volume in prose in which John Agg salutes the Spanish patriots and gives them courage in their fight against Napoleon. The first reference to Asturias (found on page 12) strikes the epic note typical of combat literature when mention is made of the continuity between the present 1808 struggle and the spirit of the ‘ancient warriors’ of Asturias: ‘The blood which animated the ancient warriors of Castile, León, Asturia, Aragón, and Andalusia, still flowed in the veins of their posterity.’ In the second reference he makes to Asturias, John Agg reproduces (in English) part of a letter that King Ferdinand VII had apparently addressed, from his exile, to the ‘noble Asturians’ that had just risen against the French: The following address from the King Ferdinand added astonishingly to the flame: ‘NOBLE ASTURIANS! I am surrounded on every side, and a victim of the most cruel perfidy. You once saved Spain in worse circumstances. At present, a prisoner, I do not ask of you the Crown; but intreat of you to form a regular plan with the neighbouring provinces, for the repulsion of a foreign yoke and the redemption of your liberties, by the destruction of your treacherous foe, who deprives of his right your unfortunate Prince, Ferdinand. Bayonne, May 8.’ (pp. 29-30)

The ‘original’ Spanish letter was a fake, forged in Oviedo by Álvaro Flórez Estrada (the newly-appointed Procurador General of the Asturian junta) and Argüelles Toral (the Junta’s secretary). As an eye-witness, Álvarez Valdés would eventually write in his memoirs of the conflict that this ‘invention, as fortunate as it was cunning’, bore ‘excellent fruit’ — including, as we can see, being used by Agg with the same propagandist ends.11 The forged letter also makes reference to the ancient feats of the Asturians, when even ‘in worse circumstances’ (this supposedly refers to the Moorish invasion) they had already ‘saved Spain’. Walter Scott would make a similar comparison, though not in a literary work, and, as I will explain below, other British writers also refer to these historical events. The third allusion to ‘Asturia’, as Agg calls the Principality of Asturias, is very much of a factual, contemporary nature (pp. 31-32): 10 11

For full publishing details, see the British Library Public Catalogue s.v. ‘Agg, John.’ See Ramón Álvarez Valdés, Memorias del levantamiento de Asturias en 1808 (Oviedo: Hospicio Provincial, 1889), p. 41 for details of this curious episode. My translation.

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The province of Asturia, forgetting the subsisting hostilities between themselves and Great Britain, dispatched messengers to this country to represent their injuries and the object of their warfare — they asked, they intreated, they implored the powerful assistance of ‘the mighty island of the ocean’, to reinstate their Sovereign on his throne, and aid them in defence of their independence. The appeal was not made in vain. England, the sanctuary of freedom, granted her assistance to a brave people fighting for their own rights and liberties. She stretched out the hand of alliance, and received the patriots of Spain as her brethren, contending to be free. Arms, ammunition, money and men were ordered to their assistance, with a promptitude scarcely ever paralleled, reflecting upon England the highest honor.

Agg refers in rather exalted terms to the Asturian Junta representatives that had been sent to London. Given the publishing date of his book, Agg is probably among the first authors in England to refer to the ‘sanctuary of freedom’ that grants assistance to ‘a brave people’ fighting for their ‘rights and liberties’, a position soon to be accepted and encouraged by most contemporary British writers who show an interest in the subject.12 As for the reception of the delegates, it is quite true that Britain assisted the Asturians with real ‘promptitude’. The Asturian deputies had arrived in London on June 8 and were received by government officials on that same day. Less than four weeks later, on July 2, two navy transports had arrived in Gijón loaded with the respectable quantity of 600 tons of weapons, gunpowder, and war supplies.13 Agg’s fourth mention of the Principality also reflects contemporary Anglo-Asturian initiatives. Agg writes: ‘A proclamation of peace with England and Sweden, her ally, was published at Oviedo, on the 20th of June.’ (p. 55) Agg then includes in an appendix to his work the full text of the proclamation of peace with Britain and Sweden, published, according to him, in Oviedo on June 20 and signed by Procurador General Flórez Estrada. (pp. 80-81) The original document was in fact published on June 21 and signed by Juan Argüelles Toral, the Junta Secretary.14 As is well known, diplomatic relations between Britain, its ally Sweden, and Spain had been suspended in 1796, at the outbreak of the war between

12 13

14

See Bainbridge, pp. 148-89 for details. See Alicia Laspra Rodríguez, Intervencionismo y revolución. Asturias y Gran Bretaña durante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808-1813) (Oviedo: Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 1992), pp. 279-303. The document has been edited in Alicia Laspra Rodríguez, ed. and trans., Las relaciones ente la Junta General del Principado de Asturias y el Reino Unido en la Guerra de la Independencia (Oviedo: Junta General del Principado de Asturias, 1999), p. 94. The original document is at The National Archives (henceforth, TNA ), Richmond, FO 95/644, p. 113.

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the two countries.15 It was only natural that after declaring war on France and sending commissioners to Britain, the Supreme Junta of Asturias should proclaim peace with Britain and Sweden. At the time when the proclamation was published, consul John Hunter, formerly of the British Embassy in Madrid, and in charge of the exchange and release of British prisoners of war, was living in Gijón. A direct witness of the events, he wrote the following letter, dated Gijón, 20 June 1808, to the Foreign Secretary George Canning:16 The schooner La Paz is to sail this night, and it affords me particular satisfaction to be able to acquaint Your Excellency, in addition to my other advices by this vessel, that this afternoon the Procurador General of the Principality arrived from Oviedo about three o’clock and called at my house to acquaint me that peace had been proclaimed in that capital this morning between this Principality, and Great Britain and Sweden. I immediately suggested to this gentleman the expediency of publishing a similar proclamation here, before the schooner should go to sea, in order that Lieutenant Prigg should have it in his power to declare in England that he has witnessed the transaction, and the procurador having agreed in opinion with me, the necessary dispositions were given with consent of the military commander. The proclamation was read at the usual places between four and five o’clock, followed by a salute of twenty one guns from the batteries, which was immediately answered by an equal number of guns from His Majesty’s schooner La Paz, and two English privateers at anchor without the harbour. I enclose a copy of the proclamation, marked H.17

Agg finally refers to the Principality as ‘the Asturias, in which the patriotic spirit first discovered itself’, thus reflecting the fact that the Principality of Asturias was among the first Spanish provinces to rise, and act accordingly. (p. 55) The second British literary author who made specific references to the Asturians and their rebellion was arguably Felicia Hemans. Contrary to the obscure personality of John Agg, this time we are dealing with a poet whose writing enjoyed immense popularity in her day.18 Hemans was born Felicia Dorothea Browne, in Liverpool, though the family soon moved to North 15

16

17

18

This state of affairs was still reflected a few weeks before the Madrid rising: on March 28th, 1808, for instance, the Spanish authorities ordered the expulsion of all Swedish subjects. Document edited in Laspra (1999), p. 24. The original document is in the Municipal Archive, Oviedo, Legajo de Órdenes Reales 1800-1810. Document edited in Laspra (1999), p. 89. The original document is at TNA, FO 72/62, pp. 104-05. Document edited in Laspra (1999), pp. 90 and 93. The original document is at TNA, FO 95/644, p. 114. See Bainbridge, pp. 154-160, and Saglia, Poetic Castles, pp. 118-130.

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Wales. Two of Hemans’ brothers, Thomas and George, were engaged in the Peninsular War, a circumstance that largely contributed to Hemans’ inspiration for her writing on the conflict. Her parents had her first book, Poems, published in 1808, when she was only fourteen. Another volume followed the same year, titled England and Spain, or Valour and Patriotism, a Poem. From then on and practically till her death in 1835, Hemans would continue publishing new writings, mostly poetry but also short stories, plays (one of them touching on another Spanish topic: The Siege of Valencia, 1823), and prose essays for the Edinburgh Monthly, Blackwood’s and other prestigious magazines. Hemans, whose reputation rose rapidly and extended to America, eventually made the acquaintance of important contemporaries who esteemed her poems, such as Percy Shelley, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Wordsworth, and Blanco White. We find the two references that Hemans specifically makes to Asturias in ‘Songs of Spain,’ originally selected by Colonel George Lloyd and published in 1830 in A Collection of Peninsular Melodies, as Saglia points out.19 The first reference to Asturias within the ‘Songs of Spain’ comes in the ‘Ancient Battle Song’: Fling for the proud banner of León again! Let the high word ‘Castile!’ go resounding through Spain! And thou, free Asturias, encamper’d on the height, Pour down thy dark sons to the vintage of light! Wake, wake! the old soil where thy children repose Sounds hollow and deep to the trampling of foes.

The poem in heroic couplets starts with references to León, Castile and Asturias, all in northern Spain, possibly recalling the presence of the Asturian deputies in London. Hemans focuses on Asturias, haranguing her ‘dark sons’ to cascade from their misty native heights into a ‘light’ which may refer to the sunnier regions of the Castilian plateau and, more metaphorically, to the ‘light’ of victory against the invading ‘foes.’ The reference to ‘free Asturias’ alludes to the times of the Moorish invasions, in line with the mention of the Asturians already having ‘saved Spain in worse circumstances’ that we saw in the apocryphal letter reproduced in English by Agg. In a similar vein, we find an additional mention to Asturias in the following extract:

19

Diego Saglia, ‘“A Deeper and Richer Music”: The Poetics of Sound and Voice in Felicia Hemans’ 1820s Poetry,’ ELH, 74 (2007), pp. 351-370 (p.362). See also The Works of Mrs Hemans; with a memoir of her life, by her sister (Mrs Harriet Hughes), 7 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, London : T. Cadell, 1841), VII, pp. 24, 31.

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There Are Sounds in the Dark Roncesvalles There are streams of unconquer’d Asturias, That have roll’d with your fathers’ free blood; Oh! leave on the graves of the mighty Proud marks where their children have stood.

This composition in ballad form ( – , a, – , a), also refers to ‘unconquered Asturias’ and the ‘free blood’ of the old Asturians, evoking again the fight against Moorish invaders, which included the Roncesvalles episode in the Pyrenees. Once more, Romantic Spain is the framework for Hemans’ description of the Peninsular War. An interesting question concerning this woman writer may be raised in terms of gender and genre. Though a woman, she felt authorised to write about what might be perceived as public or political issues. The fact that two of her brothers were personally involved in the conflict, together with her youth, favoured her popularity. But a contributing factor in her success was the fact that she was producing wartime propaganda, that is, she was somehow fighting. She often shows enthusiasm for the ‘noble Spaniards’ and a special interest in celebrating British triumphs. Her popularity stands in contrast to what happened to Anna Barbauld, whose poetic career was greatly damaged by the pro-war critics of her time. Critical accounts have emphasised the link between gender and genre in the hostility that met her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, but these responses should also be seen in the context of her anti-war attitude, at a time when the vast majority of poetic writing was supportive of the war effort.20 William Wordsworth assumed a particular role as mediator of the conflict and its consequences to his British readers, and openly addressed his countrymen in a didactic way to persuade them of the importance of sharing his beliefs. He was fully convinced that it was his moral duty to move British people in favour of the Peninsular cause. As early as 1809, Wordsworth published his famous, lengthy tract, which has been interpreted traditionally and somehow narrowly in connection with the Convention of Cintra. While it is true that Wordsworth devotes nine pages of this long essay to presenting his comments on the treaty, plus another 15 pages of the Appendix to the treaty itself, the rest of the text is entirely devoted to events connected to Spain. Wordsworth clearly specifies his determination to move his readers in favour of the Spanish cause:

20

See Bainbridge, pp. 152-54, for more details on the hostile reception of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.

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I address these words to those who have feeling, but whose judgement is overpowered by their feelings: —such as have not, and who are mere slaves of curiosity, calling perpetually for something new, and being able to create nothing new for themselves out of old materials, may be left to wander about under the yoke of their own unprofitable appetite. — Yet not so! Even these I would include in my request: and conjure them, as they are men, not to be impatient, while I place before their eyes, a composition made out of fragments of those Declarations from various parts of the Peninsula, which, disposed as it were in a tessellated pavement, shall set forth a story which may be easily understood; which will move and teach, and be consolatory to him who looks upon it. 21

Although Wordsworth would also perform his role of mediator through poetry, it was in this long essay that he would make his biggest efforts to contribute to the Spanish cause.22 As he himself explains in the introduction to the tract, he had initially chosen the press as the most effective means to spread his ideas but, for various reasons, he was later forced to turn to the essay form that identifies the text.23 Wordsworth’s essay has its own place in this study because, rather than consisting in a purely political tract, it is characterised by a strong ‘Miltonic tone’ in Saglia’s words.24 The literary nature of the tract is easily identified, most particularly through the use of rhetorical language, metaphor and other literary figures, as well as exclamations, and direct address to readers.25 The 21

22 23

24 25

William Wordsworth, Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, to Each Other and to the Common Enemy, at this Crisis; and Specifically as Affected by the Convention of Cintra: the Whole Brought to the Test of those Principles, by which alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809), pp. 12-13. Some of his Peninsular War sonnets are mentioned by Saglia, Poetic Castles, pp. 163-64. Though he did not mention Asturian episodes, Coleridge did manage to use the press in his attempt to act as mediator of the Spanish cause, and he published eight interesting Letters on the Spaniards in The Courier for this purpose. Letters I-VII were published between 7-22 December 1809 and letter VIII on 20 January 1810. But it was in another series of essays, published between May and June 1811, again in The Courier, under the heading of The War, and using the epistolary form, that he would make a special effort to show his interest in promoting sympathetic and supportive views towards the Spanish cause, thus acknowledging somehow his role as mediator. See in particular The War VI in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Essays on His Times in The Morning Post and The Courier, ed. by David V. Erdman, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), III, pp. 37-100. Poetic Castles, p. 10. The following lines illustrate these strategies: ‘Oh! That the surviving chiefs of the Spanish people may prove worthy of their situation! With such materials, —their labour would be pleasant, and their success certain. But — though heads of nations venerable for antiquity, and having good cause to preserve with reverence the institutions of their forefathers — they must not be indiscriminately afraid of new things. It is their duty to restore the good that has fallen into disuse; and also to create, and to adopt. Young scions of polity must be engrafted

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extracts he quotes from Petrarch and from Milton himself add to the literary value of this splendid piece of writing. Apart from several scattered references to Asturias that he makes throughout the essay, Wordsworth inserts extracts of Asturian proclamations on two different occasions. Wordsworth informs his readers of the fact that the Asturian government was first to declare war on France: ‘The government of Asturias, which was the first to rise against their oppressors, thus expresses itself in the opening of its Address to the People of that Province.’ (p. 23) And he then inserts an English version of a long extract of a proclamation addressed by Flórez Estrada, on behalf of the Asturian Junta, to the people of that Principality.26 Wordsworth also mentions one of the most important Asturian kings, Pelayo, in connection with an equally well-known Spanish mythical character, The Cid: 27 The names of Pelayo and The Cid are the watch-words of the address to the people of Leon; and they are told that to these two deliverers of their country, and to the sentiments of enthusiasm which they excited in every breast, Spain owes the glory and happiness which she has so long enjoyed. The Biscayans are called to cast their eyes upon the ages which are past, and they will see their ancestors at one time repulsing the Carthaginians, at another destroying the hordes of Rome; at one period was granted to them the distinction of serving in the van of the army; at another the privilege of citizens. ‘Imitate,’ says the address, ‘the glorious example of your worthy progenitors.’ The Asturians, the Galicians, and the city of Cordova, are exhorted in the same manner. (p. 35)

As he had announced in the introductory section to his essay, Wordsworth uses original proclamations to support his pro-Spanish views, which are

26

27

on the time-worn trunk: a new fortress must be reared upon the ancient and living rock of justice. Then would it be seen, while the superstructure stands inwardly immoveable, in how short a space of time the ivy and wild plant would climb up from the base and clasp the naked walls; the storms, which could not shake, would weather-stain; and the edifice, in the day of its youth, would appear to be one with the rock upon which it was planted and to grow out of it.’ Wordsworth, p. 190. The full Spanish version was published in the Gazeta de Oviedo 2, 8 June 1808, pp. 14-15, and also in Ramón Álvarez Valdés, Memorias del levantamiento de Asturias en 1808 (Oviedo: Hospicio Provincial, 1889), p. 204. Far from being past or obsolete, issues like Pelayo and the Covadonga epic, the Arab point of view, or the Asturian ‘gothicism’ (all of them, directly or indirectly dealt with by these authors), are still concerns today. See La época de la monarquía asturiana. Actas del simposio celebrado en Covadonga (8-10 de octubre de 2001) (Oviedo: RIDEA, 2002): Julia Montenegro and Arcadio del Castillo, ‘Pelayo y Covadonga: una revisión historiográfica’, pp. 111-24; Felipe Maíllo Salgado, ‘El Reino de Asturias desde la perspectiva de las fuentes árabes’, pp. 229-50, and Isabel Torrente Fernández, ‘Goticismo astur e ideología política’ pp. 295-316.

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deeply influenced by Romantic ideals, as the revision of myth and heroic history shows. One more proclamation connected to Asturias is again extracted and translated into English on pages 39-40. As the author says, it is dated Oviedo, 17 July and it is intended to encourage Spanish people to remain united and to fight for their independence in order to triumph over tyranny. A fourth example of English propaganda writing that makes specific reference to Asturias is found in the book called Iberia’s Crisis (1809) by Henry Gally Knight. Born in 1786, Knight was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge. According to the DNB, in 1810 and 1811 H.G. Knight travelled in Spain, Sicily, Greece, Egypt, and Palestine, and his first published works were oriental verses, which saw public light in 1816 and 1817, and were praised by Lord Byron. Evidence from Byron’s letters written during his own Mediterranean and Levant tour of 1809-11 indicates that Byron had met Knight at Cambridge, then at Cadiz in August 1809, and at Patras in July 1810. Yet far from praising his Ilderim, a Syrian Tale and the subsequent Phrosyne, a Grecian Tale, Byron privately ridiculed and despised the poet’s ‘mediocrity’.28 An M.P. for Aldborough, and a kind landlord, Knight turned to writing (more successfully) on architecture in his maturity. He died in 1846. In his book Iberia’s Crisis: A fragment of an epic poem, in three parts, written in Spain; developing the cause, progress and events of Spain’s crisis, Knight follows a curious method.29 His epic poem on the beginnings of the Peninsular War, written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, is constantly illustrated by footnotes (referred to by super indexical lower-case letters) which explain or give additional information on his terse and metaphoric verses. Thus, the first reference to Asturias, complete with footnote, reads as follows (p. 27): España’s Bourbon house were pris’ners made. Decoy’d Fernando, shut in durance vile, Wail’d to Iberia’s sons his cruel lot.k k ‘Brave Asturians’ ...

What follows in the footnote is the English version of the apocryphal letter of Ferdinand VII to the Asturians — the same forged letter that, as we know, John Agg had quoted the year before. The second reference to Asturias found in the poem describes the delegation sent to London (p. 44):

28

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See especially Byron to Hobhouse, July 29th 1810 from Patras in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (Cambridge, Mass.1973-1992), II, pp. 5-6. London: W. Miller, 1809.

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Iberia’s past’ral swains had much achiev’d, Untrain’d, in curbing thus a leagued foe, Expert at treachery and stratagem, And su’d for British aid to vindicate Their violated rights.d d. The Spanish patriots who repaired as deputies from their country to the English Government, intreating for British aid against the oppressors of their nation, were, Viscount Materosa, Admiral Apodoca, and General Jácome. They arrived in London June 8th, 1808.

Knight’s reference to the ‘past’ral swains’ and their ability to curb a much superior enemy even if ‘untrain’d’ is far from being rhetorical, or just wishful thinking. In the specific case of Asturias, one of the military commissioners sent to the area by the British government, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Richard Dyer, wrote the following lines in a letter to Foreign Secretary George Canning, dated Oviedo, 9 November 1808: In my recent tour to the interior [of Asturias] I found my young friends wholly at exercise, forming small parties to attack the French. They are mostly boys from 13 to 15 and all of them fire powder. They tell me many of the poor boys become drummers and afterwards soldiers, and I am sure if the same spirit is kept up all the armies of France will not make the conquest of Spain during the life of Bonaparte.30

As for the footnote (k), reference to Asturias is personified in the figure of ‘Viscount Materosa’; that is, José María Queipo de Llano y Ruiz de Sarabia, Viscount Matarrosa and VII Count Toreno, the main representative of the Asturian Junta in London following 1809. Knight’s footnote presents other distortions. It is not Apodoca but Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, a representative of the Seville Junta and later of the Central Junta. Adrián Jácome was also a Junta of Seville representative. These three personalities did not arrive in London as a group on June 8, 1808, as the texts seems to imply. As we know, Matarrosa (together with De la Vega and Álvarez de Miranda) did arrive in London on June 8; but Admiral Ruiz de Apodaca and General Jácome would not do so until the end of July. In any case, both the text and the note bear further witness to the popularity of the Spanish cause and of the Asturian and other envoys in London.

30

Document edited in Laspra (1999), pp. 449-50. The original document is at TNA, F.O. 72/64, pp. 262-63.

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Protest Writing (1812): Lord Byron Byron visited Spain in August, 1809 on his way to the Eastern Mediteranean.31 Though he started writing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage during his tour, the poem was published on his return to England in 1812 and won him instant success (his much-quoted “I woke up one morning and found myself famous” testifies to this). In the context of this study, the interest of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage lies in that it briefly but thoroughly revisits one of the strongest Spanish myths ever built, that of Covadonga and King Pelayo in the origins of the Reconquest and subsequent and gradual expulsion of the Moors.32 O lovely Spain, renown’d, romantic land! Where is that standard, which Pelagio bore, When Cava’s traitor-sire first called the band That dyed thy mountain-streams with gothic gore? Where are those bloody banners which of yore Waved over thy sons, victorious to the gale, And drove at last the spoilers to their shore? Red gleam’d the cross, and waned the Crescent pale, While Afric’s echoes thrill’d with Moorish matron’s wail!

This is the first stanza in the Canto dealing specifically with Spain and with Asturias as well. Like Knight before him (only more briefly), Byron gives and explains the historical facts beyond his stanza in a footnote, at the end of the stanza’s fourth line. The footnote reads: ‘Count Julian’s daughter, the Helen of Spain. Pelagius preserved his independence in the fastnesses of the Asturias, and the descendants of his followers, after some centuries, completed their struggle by the conquest of Grenada.’ Byron references Asturias as the origin of a Spanish medieval Reconquest against the Moors which finds a parallel in the Anglo-Spanish and Portuguese ‘reconquest’ taking place against the French — not surprisingly, much of the rest of the Canto is devoted to fictionalising the contemporary events. Yet Byron will be, for the most part, harshly ironical when he develops his references to the renowned and victorious ‘romantic land.’ In this initial ‘Asturian’ stanza, he will actually set the tone by using carefully selected terms to provide the scene with a red 31

32

For more details of his Spanish visit, see the recent study by Agustín Coletes Blanco, “Lord Byron y John C. Hobhouse, testigos y propagandistas de la Guerra Peninsular”, in Actas del VII Congreso de Historia Militar. La Guerra de la Independencia española: una visión militar, 2 vols (Zaragoza: Academia General Militar, 2008), 2. pp. 219-22. Canto I. xxxv. Byron’s Poems, ed. by Sola Pinto, 3 vols (London, Dent, 1963), I, p. 87. King Pelayo’s myth is based on historical fact.

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colouring that reminds of death and slaughter: mountain streams dyed with gothic ‘gore’; ‘bloody banners’; the holy cross gleaming ‘red’. In a typical ‘protest writing’ attitude, Byron seems to remind us that victory has a price, which is the price of war — death and bloodshed.

Literature about War (1847): T. M. Hughes As stated earlier, Literature about War refers to writing done in a post-war period, when many witnesses are still alive. It is not always authored by the war protagonists themselves, and shows a tendency to artistic elaboration or philosophical reflection on the conflict, its causes, and consequences. What is interesting, in any case, is that we are able to verify that more than thirty years after the conflict had ended there is still an English author who refers specifically to the Asturians, the first who had ‘su’d for British aid’, as Knight had put it in 1809. Iberia Won (1847), by Terence Mahon Hughes, contains the last substantial set of references to Asturias and the 1808 events. There is no entry for this author in the DNB or other similar encyclopaedic dictionaries. According to the American National Union Catalog, Terence McMahon Hughes was born in 1812 and died in 1849.33 The British Library Catalogue includes eight books by this author, all of them published between 1839 and 1848, sometimes anonymously or under the pseudonym Corney the Rhymer. Hughes went to Spain and lived in that country for a period, as is apparent in the title of his book Revelations of Spain in 1845: By an English Resident (1845), and also in the title of the work that interests us here, which reads in full: Iberia Won; a Poem Descriptive of the Peninsular War: with Impressions from Recent Visits to the Battle-grounds, and Copious Historical and Illustrative Notes.34 Hughes’ Iberia Won is a typical product of Literature about War as a specific genre. The poet visits the old battlegrounds and, inspired by his visit, writes a long, patriotic poem in homage to the courageous soldiers that fought and died there. Hughes further makes use of a literary persona whom he calls Salustian. This allegorical character voices the following reference to Asturias and the times of the Reconquest in Canto VII:

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For full publishing details of works arguably authored by Hughes, the British Library Public Catalogue, s.v., has to be completed with the American National Union Catalog (2004), likewise available online: . It is the latter catalogue that adds ‘Mc’ to Hughes’ middle name. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847).

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xxxi “Dire was the ruin by Corruption’s hand Shed on our ancient monarchy. Her men Were noble still and worthy of the land, Whose blood hath poured in every mountain-glen From Calpe to Asturia’s rudest den, ‘Gainst warlike Moor contending. But her kings Unworthy most beneath dominion’s ken To hold so proud a people — timorous things — Crawled ‘neath a favourite’s sway, or crouched ‘neath Churchmen’s wings.”

Here we find an initial reference to the Reconquest and its beginning in Asturias’ ‘rudest den’ (possibly meant as an allusion to Covadonga), which lead the poet to link those events with the 1808 war. The reference to Asturias and the Reconquest as a precedent of 1808, the epic tone, and some of the associated vocabulary, reminds us of the cited Byron stanza; however, what constitutes a novelty here is the subtle way in which blame for the Spanish crisis of 1808 is laid on the ‘corruption’ of the country’s monarchy, which let itself lapse into the hands of the ‘favourites’ or the ‘churchmen’, thus becoming ‘unworthy’ of ruling such a fine people. Let us remember, in this instance, that Spanish monarchs and rulers being unworthy of their people is practically a stereotype, constantly found in the writings of British travellers in Spain — Hughes, after all, was one of them.35 References to Asturias in Iberia Won do not at all end with the above. As many as four successive stanzas in Canto VIII give more details. Salustian continues his narration: “Asturia first and noblest raised the cry — Cantabria still untamed the yoke to bear Our own Biscaya sees with Baston vie — Oviedo’s lightning flies to Santander. It wakes Galicia, kindling León’s air. Castile, unconquered Aragón, Navarre, The standard of revolt successive bear. Valencian, Catalan, and And’luz far The cry devoted raise: ‘Against the Invader War!’”

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The Spaniards are ‘the best sort of people under the worst kind of government’, Jardine famously wrote in his Letters from Spain (1788): see further David Mitchell, Travellers in Spain (Málaga: Santana Books, 2004) pp. 19-39 esp., and José Francisco Pérez Berenguel, Introduction to his Spanish edition and translation of Jardine’s Letters (Alicante: Universidad, 2001), pp. 115-36. Other influential travellers like Joseph Townsend and Richard Ford wrote in similar terms.

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Mention is now made of the fact that Asturias (its capital, Oviedo, is specifically named as well) was the first province to rise against the French and that from there, rebellion soon spread on to Santander, Galicia, León, and the rest of Spain. This narrative corresponds to the historical facts. In the days immediately after the uprising, the Asturian Junta sent envoys to England, and also to the neighbouring provinces. Thus, the Junta deputies Francisco Miravalles and Pedro Álvarez-Cerelluelo were sent to León, Alonso de la Concha and José Carrandi to Santander, and Joaquín Sánchez and Vicente Morán to La Coruña. The British authorities were duly informed of these initiatives by the Asturian Junta’s deputies in London.36 As a consequence, Canning, speaking in the name of George III, would show his willingness to help not only the Asturians, but also all those that might follow their example. As early as 12 June 1808 Canning was writing to the Asturian deputies as follows: ‘I am commanded by His Majesty to declare to you His Majesty’s willingness to extend his support to all such parts of the Spanish monarchy, as shall shew themselves to be actuated by the same spirit which animates the inhabitants of Asturias’.37 The next stanza includes Asturian references with which we are already familiar: xi “And lightning fell, ’twas said, upon the shrine of Guadalupe within the fatal hour That saw the last of León’s Royal line retire to France, and own the Usurper’s power. In Covadonga, where Mahoma’s flower Pelayo slaughtered, drops of sweat were seen Upon the face of Her who stood our tower In battle; Compostella’s tomb a din of arms gave forth, Saint James proclaiming we should win!”

Canto VII draws on the mythology of the beginnings of the Reconquest in Asturias and to the mountain site of Covadonga or King Pelayo. These symbols are combined with allusions to the general 1808 crisis, to the Spanish royal family being put to exile in France, and the ‘usurper’ king acting as a substitute. Finally, stanzas xii and xiii read as follows: xii “Thus spoke the general voice — thus Spain believed, And, Heaven and Earth approving, rushed to arms.

36 37

See Laspra (1992) p. 118 for details. Document edited and translated into Spanish in Laspra (1999), pp. 46-47. The original document is at TNA, FO 72/66, pp. 7-9.

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The web of Tyranny was swift unweaved, The land was soon o’erspread by War’s alarms; For Freedom’s fire once lit intensely charms! But terrible at first in dire excess Rude license many a timid patriot harms. If perished tyrant-tools yet, ah, not less Good men, too, slaughtered fell in butchery’s helplessness.’ xiii ’Twas then the Asturian seniors crost the sea, And I amongst the number, as ye know, To Albions’s glorious Island of the free, Her aid demanding ‘gainst the general foe. And grand and mighty was the enthusiast flow From brave and generous hearts we witnessed there. Our strife forgot, our feuds aside we throw, Like ancient warriors after battle share The social rite, and war combined ’gainst France declare.”

After commemorating the death of a number of ‘good men’ who fell victims to the ‘butchery’ of the first days of conflict, the poet focuses in what he calls ‘the Asturian seniors’ and their crossing the sea in order to demand ‘Albion’s’ aid. This last and fairly long reference to the Asturian deputies in London reminds us strongly of John Agg in 1808. Agg referred to England as ‘the sanctuary of freedom’; Hughes now writes of Albion as the ‘glorious island of the free’; Agg wrote about the Asturian ‘messengers’ and their having ‘asked, intreated, implored’ the help of Britain; Hughes alludes to the Asturian ‘seniors’ and ‘her [Britain’s] aid demanding’ against the French. The later initiative they took after ‘forgetting the hostilities’ between themselves and Britain in Agg’s words, or, what is the same, ‘our strife forgot’ in Hughes’ words. Once more, this is a literary reflection of the historical facts. In the already mentioned letter of 12 June 1808 from Canning to the Asturian deputies he had conveyed the British Government’s desire to establish a new friendly relationship with Spain. Hughes may of course have known Agg’s 1808 Dawn of Liberty — or it may simply be a case of shared reactions and feelings towards a most peculiar episode: the unexpected rising, against the mighty power of Napoleon, of plucky Asturias, a province ‘of as little consequence with reference to the Kingdom of Spain, as Glamorganshire is to England’, as Malmesbury had put it in 1808.38 Inevitably, the episode 38

Malmesbury’s was an early reaction, recorded in his diary’s entry corresponding to August 16th, 1808. Document edited and translated into Spanish in Laspra (1999) pp. 241-42. Malmesbury’s diaries were first edited in 1844 (London: Richard Bentley).

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would leave its own imprint on English war literature. In the closing section of this essay, I will try to highlight the main features of such an imprint.

Conclusions Contrary to what Fletcher writes, British war literature on the Peninsular War does exist, including the episode whose fictionalisation I have tried to bring to light and analyse here — the Asturian 1808 rising and its commission to London. Couplets, quatrains, ballads, and epic poems were the favourite vehicle for representing this episode and the thematic and factual similarities suggest a probable case of intertextuality between Agg’s Dawn of Liberty (1808) and Hughes’ Iberia Won (1847). Of particular interest are the specific themes connected to the episode as fictionalised in the texts: The Reconquest and its beginnings in the Asturian mountains, as a precedent and an example to follow, is evoked in some detail by five of the six authors reviewed (all but Knight, but twice in Hughes’ case). Another object of interest is the Asturian commission in London, a contemporary event dealt with by three authors (Agg, Knight, and Hughes). The early Asturian rising, finally, is revisited by three writers (Hemans, Wordsworth, and Hughes). In these texts relating to Asturias, three modes of War Literature have been identified: War Literature proper, with four texts about the Asturian episode classifiable in the subcategory of wartime propaganda and one text in the subcategory of Protest Writing, and Literature about War, with one additional text ascribed to it. While these literary documents illustrate writers as mediators of a conflict for the general public, the historical documents introduced to clarify some of the literary references offer parallel readings (literary vs. non-literary), as suggested by New Historicism with its emphasis on the need for combining a variety of cultural components in our interpretation of life and art.

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Bibliography Agg, John. 1808. The Dawn of Liberty on the Continent of Europe; or, the Struggle of the Spanish Patriots for the Emancipation of their Country (Bristol: John Agg) [British Library, 1060.g.2] Álvarez Valdés, Ramón, Memorias del levantamiento de Asturias en 1808 (Oviedo: Hospicio Provincial, 1889) Archivo Municipal de Oviedo, Órdenes Reales 1800-1810. Aymes, Jean René, La Guerra de la Independencia en España (1808-1814) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2008) Bainbridge, Simon, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Byron, Lord [George Gordon] Poems, ed. by Sola Pinto, 3 vols (London, Dent, 1963), I, p. 87. ——, Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (Cambridge, Mass.1973-1992), II, pp. 5-6. Clarke, J. British Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, 1782-1865 The International Interest (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) Coletes Blanco, Agustín, “Lord Byron y John C. Hobhouse, testigos y propagandistas de la Guerra Peninsular”, in Actas del VII Congreso de Historia Militar. La Guerra de la Independencia española: una visión militar, 2 vols (Zaragoza: Academia General Militar, 2008), II, pp. 219-22. Crossley, Ceri, ‘History, nature and national identity in France, 1800-30’, Literature and History, 10.1 (2001), 18-27. Cuddon, John A, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) Cuenca Toribio, José Manuel, La Guerra de la Independencia; un conflicto decisivo, 1808-1814 (Madrid: Encuentro, 2006) De Diego García, Emilio, España, el infierno de Napoleón (Madrid: La esfera de los libros, 2008) Dictionary of National Biography, Supplements, 22 vols (London: Oxford UP, 1950) Durán de Porras, Elías, Galicia, The Times y la Guerra de la Independencia. Henry Crabb Robinson y la corresponsalía de The Times en A Coruña, 1808-1809 (A Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2008) Erdman, David V., ed. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Essays on His Times in The Morning Post and The Courrier, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) Esdaile, Charles, The Peninsular War: A New History (London: Penguin, 2003)

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Fletcher, Ian, ‘Introduction’, in Against All Hazards: Poems of the Peninsular War, ed. by Harry Turner (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2001), pp. ix-xiii. Fraser, Ronald, La maldita guerra de España. Historia social de la Guerra de la Independencia, 1808-1814. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2007) García Cárcel, Ricardo, El sueño de la nación indomable: los mitos de la Guerra de la Independencia (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2007) Gates, David, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (London: Allen, 1986) ‘Proclama de la Junta general del Principado’, Gazeta de Oviedo, 8 June 1808, pp. 14-15. Greenblatt, Stephen J., and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Guerrero, Ana Clara, Viajeros británicos en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Aguilar, 1990) Hemans, Felicia Dorothea, Peninsular Melodies, ed. by Col. Hughes, ([London]: Mrss Goulding and D’Almaine, [1808]) [British Library, 993.e.10-12] ——, England and Spain; or Valour and Patriotism (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808) Hughes, Terence McMahon, Iberia won; a poem descriptive of the Peninsular War: With impressions from recent visits to the battle-grounds, and copious historical and illustrative notes (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847) [British Library, 11645.c.20] Jardine, Alexander. Cartas de España [Letters from Spain], ed. and trans. by Pérez Berenguer (Alicante: Universidad, 2001) [Knight, Henry Gally], Iberia’s Crisis: A fragment of an epic poem, in three parts, written in Spain; developing the cause, progress and events of Spain’s crisis (London: W. Miller, 1809) [British Library, 1141.f.35] Laspra Rodríguez, Alicia Intervencionismo y revolución: Asturias y Gran Bretaña durante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808-1813) (Oviedo: Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos [CSIC], 1992) ——, ed. and trans., Las relaciones entre la Junta General del Principado de Asturias y el Reino Unido de Gran Bretaña e Irlanda en la Guerra de la Independencia (Oviedo: Junta General del Principado, 1999) ——, ‘De la hostilidad a la alianza: el Puerto de Gijón y las relaciones asturbritánicas’, in Gijón, puerto anglosajón, ed. Agustín Coletes Blanco, (Oviedo: Nobel, 2005) pp. 55-77. Lovett, Gabriel H., La Guerra de la Independencia y el nacimiento de la España contemporánea, 2 vols (Barcelona: Península, 1975)

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Maíllo Salgado, Felipe, ‘El Reino de Asturias desde la perspectiva de las fuentes árabes’, La época de la monarquía asturiana. Actas del simposio celebrado en Covadonga (8-10 de octubre de 2001), ed. by Área de Historia Medieval, Universidad de Oviedo (Oviedo: Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 2002), pp. 229-50. Mitchell, David. Travellers in Spain. An illustrated anthology (Málaga: Santana Books, 2004) Moliner Prada, Antonio, ed., La Guerra de la Independencia en España (Barcelona: Nabla Ediciones, 2007) Montenegro, Julia, and Arcadio del Castillo, ‘Pelayo y Covadonga: una revisión historiográfica’ La época de la monarquía asturiana. Actas del simposio celebrado en Covadonga (8-10 de octubre de 2001), ed. by Área de Historia Medieval, Universidad de Oviedo (Oviedo: Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 2002), pp. 111-24. O’Grenby, Mathew O., ‘Politicised fiction in Britain 1790-1810: An annotated checklist’, The European English Messenger, 9/2 (2000), 47-53. Rose, John Holland, ‘Canning and the Spanish Patriots in 1808’ American Historical Review 12 (1906), 39-52. Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) ——, ‘“A Deeper and Richer Music”: The Poetics of Sound and Voice in Felicia Hemans 1820s Poetry,’ ELH, 74 (2007), 351-370 (p.362). Severn, John K, A Wellesley Affair. Richard Marquess Wellesley and the Conduct of Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy, 1808-1812 (Tallahassee: Florida UP, 1981) Sherwig, John Martin, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France 1793-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) Sweet, Nanora, and Julie Melnyk, eds., Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) The Works of Mrs Hemans: With a memoir of her life; by her sister [Mrs Harriet Hughes] 7 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1839) The National Archives (Richmond) Foreign Office, series FO 95/644; F.O. 72/62; F.O. 72/64; F.O. 72/66; Torrente Fernández, Isabel, ‘Goticismo astur e ideología política’, in La época de la monarquía asturiana. Actas del simposio celebrado en Covadonga (8-10 de octubre de 2001), ed. by Área de Historia Medieval, Universidad de Oviedo (Oviedo: Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 2002), pp. 295-316. United Kingdom, The British Library, British Library Integrated Catalogue, (2008)

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United States of America, Library of Congress, The National Union Catalog, (2004) Wordsworth, William, Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, to Each Other and to the Common Enemy, at this Crisis; and Specifically as Affected by the Convention of Cintra: the Whole Brought to the Test of those Principles, by which alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809)

Susan Valladares

‘He that can bring the dead to life again’: Resurrecting the Spanish Setting of Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) and Remorse (1813) The Spanish insurrection of 1808 and the ensuing Peninsular War (1808-1814) gripped the attention of the British nation. As a result, Spain increasingly featured in various media, including newspapers, caricatures, travelogues, plays, poems, novels, and translations. There is however, a notable absence of scholarship on theatrical representations of Spain during this period. This essay proposes to address this critical gap by investigating the textual history of Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) and its transformation into Remorse (1813). It contends that the theatre, characterised by its improvisation and topicality, offers a distinctive lens through which to explore the political consciousness engendered by the Napoleonic Wars. According to Coleridge, the Spanish cause ‘made us all once more Englishmen’. Remorse is a play in which personal and political ideologies blur beyond distinction. Everything is in flux, unsettled, and for Coleridge, fruitfully so. Investigating Coleridge’s ambivalent feelings of attraction and repulsion towards Drury Lane, this essay traces how Coleridge’s Spain emerged as an experimental ‘stage’ in which national identities could be (re)conceived and rehearsed during a time of political turmoil at home and abroad. This essay will analyze the impact of the Peninsular War on British Romanticism, tracing how Coleridge develops his Spanish setting into a geopolitical space charged with unsettling questions about national identity, the imperial enterprise, religion and superstition, gender, and history.

In 1796, Coleridge was asked by Sheridan, then manager of Drury Lane theatre, ‘to write a tragedy on some popular subject’.1 The result was Osorio (1797). Set in sixteenth-century Spain, Coleridge’s play dramatized the heroic Albert’s secret return to his beloved Maria, and Granada, the home from which his scheming brother Osorio had ousted him. The play was never performed. Sheridan, complaining of its ‘obscurity’, rejected Coleridge’s bid and, until relatively recently, Romantic scholars have tended to be equally dismissive.2 Arnold Fox, for instance, claimed that ‘the modern casual reader will find in Osorio merely a blood and guts tragedy which has been deservedly neglected.’3 But Coleridge never abandoned the dramatic model afforded by his early playtext. By 1813, he reworked Osorio into Remorse, 1

2 3

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), I, p. 304 (Letter 175). Collected Letters, I, p. 358 (Letter 213). Arnold Fox, ‘The Political and Biographical Background of Coleridge’s Osorio’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 61 (1962), 258-267.

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an immediate stage success, deemed by several contemporary reviewers to be equal to the task of reforming English drama.4 As the British Review judiciously noted, at least part of this newfound popularity was due to the fact that ‘at the present moment [...] any thing relating to the Peninsula is an object of interest’.5 Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Spain in the Spring of 1808 had made Spain a recognizably ‘popular subject’. The dos de mayo rebellion, the deployment of British troops to the Peninsula, the Convention of Cintra, the retreat from Corunna, and the Constitution of 1812 ensured events in the Peninsula were at the forefront of British political concerns. By June 1808, more than 9,500 men had been dispatched to the Peninsula under Wellesley’s command, with an estimated £18 million in cash being invested during the campaign.6 A decisive factor in Napoleon’s downfall, the Peninsular War (1808-1814) helped generate an interest in Spain that would continue to occupy the British imagination long after the victory at Waterloo. This essay will explore the popular appeal of Spain to late Georgian Britain, questioning the extent to which Remorse’s Spanish inflections engaged the public’s fascination with the Iberian Peninsula.7 Osorio and Remorse, although essentially two versions of the same plot, were separated by more than a decade and a half. Anglo-Hispanic scholarship today demands that these plays be ‘resurrected’ and read comparatively. Together, they provide useful insights into Coleridge’s ambivalent feelings of attraction and repulsion towards the theatre, the interplay between commerce, political ideology, and religion in theatrical representations of the Peninsula, and how, by the early nineteenth century, Spain itself had emerged as an experimental stage whereupon national identities could be conceived, reconceived and rehearsed.

4

5

6

7

See reviews of Remorse, in Coleridge; The Critical Heritage, ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). British Review, in The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers: Part A: The Lake Poets, ed. by Donald Reiman, 2 vols (London: Garland Publishing Inc, 1972), I, p. 222. Gregory Fremont-Barnes, The Napoleonic Wars: The Peninsular Wars 1807-1814 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002), p. 87. See Diego Saglia, ‘Spanish Stages: British Romantic Tragedy and the Theatrical Politics of Spain, 1808-1823’, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), 19-32. In this essay, Saglia considers the ‘nexus of Spain, war, and the stage’ in early nineteenth-century British Romantic tragedy (p.22). My essay extends Saglia’s reading of Remorse by further foregrounding the changes Coleridge made to Osorio in light of the Peninsular situation, considering especially the plays’ generic classification, and exploring more closely Coleridge’s involvement with theatrical economies, his support of the Spanish campaign and anxieties about the performance of Spanish politics in early nineteenth-century Britain.

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Georgian Britain’s political position in the world was often explored alongside alternative forms of nation-making. In both versions of Coleridge’s Spanish play, the Peninsula is variously imagined as a historical, geographical and political site. Spain, a space of cultural conflict and confrontation, was a location wherein British values could be contested and negotiated.8 Through a historically and culturally specific Spanish lens, Coleridge’s plays explore the public themes of exile, religious and political persecution, and the founding of the modern state: ‘Time: The reign of Philip II, just at the close of the civil wars against the Moors, and during the heat of the persecution which raged against them, shortly after the edict which forbad the wearing of Moresco apparel under pain of Death’.9 At the time of Remorse’s setting, Philip II was the most powerful ruler in Europe, with dominions extending from Spain to Italy and France, colonies in the Low Countries, and further afield in Mexico and Peru. By July 1807, Napoleon had secured an equivalent position of almost total dominance in Central Europe, conferred by the French annexation of the Low Countries in 1810. In Remorse, Coleridge takes clear advantage of the ways in which the Napoleonic Wars were engendering both a new sense of historical perspective and chronological immediacy. The playbills for Remorse drew particular attention to the play’s historical setting and underlined the sense of synchronicity in space and cultural developments that tied sixteenth and early nineteenth-century imperial histories. Spain, as a historical site, offered Coleridge and his audiences the much-needed critical perspective conducive to re-forming an active political mind. In Remorse, personal and political ideologies blur beyond distinction. Everything is in flux, unsettled, and for Coleridge, fruitfully so. Tellingly, in his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge looks back to the Spanish cause as the event that ‘made us all once more Englishmen’.10 This sense of re-discovering his patriotism through the restorative power of the Spanish cause decisively confirms that for Coleridge, history was more than a ‘lumber room of Penitence’.11 The historical drama, with its attendant investment in the

8

9

10

11

Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Atlanta: Amsterdam, 2000). Remorse (Stage), in Poetical Works: Plays III.2, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed by J.C.C. Mays, 16 vols (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), XVI p. 1073. Further references are to this edition. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), I, p. 189. Collected Letters, I, p. 397 (Letter 238).

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power of revisionism, offered an essential means of responding to the unsettled power dynamics of the European diplomatic scene. Even Osorio took full advantage of its historical and geographical distance from Georgian Britain. In Act II scene 2, Maurice (‘much affected’) claims that Albert is ‘a painter’, able ‘to call up past deeds, and make them live | On the blank Canvas’.12 The metaphor is a useful one, conceptualising artistic representation as a means of enabling the return of the repressed. Indeed, Albert’s self-portrayal as ‘He that can bring the dead to life again’, recurs in the play with such forcefulness as to render it into a haunting refrain.13 It becomes inextricably attached to Coleridge as a dramatist, arguing (in both 1797 and 1813) that history could and should be read philosophically, that even its oppressed narratives of loss and deceit were available for abstraction. During the tense climate of the 1790s, Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682) was the most popular tragedy in the repertoire after Shakespeare. Radicals such as John Thelwall were known to stand up and applaud their favourite conspiratorial speeches in the play. As a genre holding recognisably popular and radical associations, Coleridge’s decision to catalogue Osorio as an historical tragedy was all the more significant. By 1795, the Pitt government had decidedly embarked on its reactionary backlash against the movement for reform by passing the Seditious Meeting Bill and Treasonable Practice Bill (1795). The 1796 Notebook records Coleridge’s response to the Two Bills as an affront to the British Constitution, the government ‘preventing by these Bills the growth of the human mind’.14 In Osorio, this oppression is figured through Alhadra’s experiences under the Inquisition, aligning Moorish history with the plight of British radicals. Responding to Maria’s enquiry as to the nature of her crime, Alhadra poignantly replies, ‘Solely, my complexion’.15 The arbitrary nature of her imprisonment finds its contemporary counterpart in the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1794. The Inquisition’s persecution of the Moors doubles as the British government’s ousting of dissenting radicals. History weighed down heavily on sixteenthcentury Spanish politics, and Britain’s inability to learn from the Spanish

12

13 14

15

Osorio, in Poetical Works: Plays III.1, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge XVI (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), II.ii.19-21, p. 88. Further references are to this edition. Osorio, II.ii.140, p. 87. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), I, p. 1796, entry 99. Osorio, I.i.207, p. 72.

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precedent amounted to a fatal flaw which, to the radical Coleridge, could only end in tragedy. In May 1796, Coleridge wrote to John Thelwall about the Peripatetic sage and his two classes of ‘bad men’: ‘wet or intemperate Sinners’ and vicious ‘dry villains’.16 The former grouping was of particular interest to Coleridge. Insofar as it represents men ‘hurried into vice by their appetites, but [who] acknowledge their actions to be vicious’, its members are deemed to be ‘reclaimable’.17 In the circumscribed time-frame of tragedy, ‘reclaim’ is however, always tantalizingly beyond reach. Instead, cumulative forces and external events propel the protagonists towards their inevitable destruction. If in the 1790s, reform was uppermost in Coleridge’s political agenda, why then deny the possibility of ‘reclaiming’? After all, ‘reform’ and ‘reclaim’ belong to the same discursive register of improvement. The answer does not so much lie in the annals of historical fact, as in Coleridge’s choice to dramatize history, bringing it to life in the affective medium of theatrical representation. In both 1797 and 1813, Coleridge looked towards the theatre as a forum in which to explore the politics of feeling. Whilst Coleridge could write confident political prose, there was something unique about the theatrical experience, which made his decision to write a Spanish drama particularly loaded.18 In her ‘Introductory Discourse’ to A Series of Plays (1798), Joanna Baillie defined the theatre as a school ‘in which much good or evil may be learned’.19 Drama, perhaps more than any other medium, could propound its didactic lessons by taking advantage of the human need to relate: ‘it is only from creatures like ourselves that we feel and […] receive the instruction of example.’20 Whereas other writers can approach a study of human nature as ‘auxiliary’, Baillie argues that to the dramatist, ‘it is the centre and strength of the battle’.21 This elevation of character psychology becomes the crucial signifier of Baillie’s interest in ‘what men are in the closet as well as the

16 17 18

19

20 21

Collected Letters, I, p. 213 (Letter 127). Ibid. For Coleridge’s writings on Spain in The Courier, particularly his ‘Letters on the Spaniards’ (7 December 1809- 20 January 1810), see Essays On His Own Times, ed. by David V. Erdman, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge III, general editor Kathleen Coburn, 3 vols (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), II. Joanna Baillie, ‘Introductory Discourse’, A Series of Plays in which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Each Passion being the Subject of a Tragedy and Comedy [1798], introduced by Caroline Franklin (London: Routeldge/Thoemmes Press, 1996), p. 58. Baillie, p. 33. Ibid., p. 23.

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field’.22 Moreover, it bears witness to a fascination, shared by Coleridge, in how the spectator implicates himself in the sympathetic response. Adam Smith’s bestselling Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) had decisively shaped the public interest in the relationship between sympathetic agents and subjects. Significantly, Smith imagined the sympathetic response as a sort of identity transfer, not altogether distinct from Boswell’s definition of the player as one who ‘must assume in a strong degree the character which he represents, while he at the same time retains the consciousness of his own character’.23 Smith writes: Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers […] it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. […] we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him […] we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.24

The social immediacy of theatre empowered audiences to tap into the experiences of an ‘other’, both emotionally and intellectually. Coleridge’s historical drama of imperial Spain and its double theme of the revelation of others and improved perception of self demanded nothing less. By transferring the political ideology of the Spanish theatre of war into the real theatre conditions of Drury Lane, Coleridge enforced an important link between institutional and geographical spaces. As Gillian Russell has convincingly argued, since the late eighteenth century, the patent houses and minor theatres had been in fierce competition to ‘bring the war home’ by staging entertainments of patriotic retribution.25 Pantomimes such as Harlequin and Humpo (staged on 25 January 1813, as an afterpiece to Coleridge’s Remorse), effectively showcased a sample of Georgian modernity, highlighting Britain’s technical and military achievements. At the same time, Drury Lane’s status as a ‘licensed theatre’ brought with it an implicit need to differentiate between entertainments fit for the theatre proper, and a looser, more general notion of stage-space. The unlicensed physicality and raw sensationalism of what Jane Moody has defined as London’s ‘illegitimate’ theatrical scene needed to be distinguished from the 22 23

24

25

Ibid., p. 18. James Boswell, On the Profession of a Player: Three Essays [1770], (Suffolk: Elkin Mathews & Marrot Ltd, 1929), Essay II, p. 18. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1759), Chapter 1, section 1, p. 2. Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 66-74.

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textually-based dramas deemed proper to the patent playhouses.26 In choosing to submit his play-script to Drury Lane, Coleridge was at once making a claim to status and aligning his Spanish play with the decidedly more high-brow aspirations of ‘spoken’ rather than merely ‘spectacular’ entertainment. The materiality of Georgian drama could be as dangerous as it was exciting. Since the late eighteenth century, Drury Lane and Covent Garden had been increasingly leaning towards the spectacular entertainments associated with the unlicensed theatres. In his scathing critique of Maturin’s Bertram as a play overly-dependent on stimulating the senses, Coleridge pointedly noted that the greater part of the Drury Lane audience would have ‘small chance of hearing a word’.27 The visual had taken a predominant hold of audiences’ theatrical experiences. From as early as 1794, the theatre’s capacity had been increased from two-thousand and five hundred to over three-thousand and six hundred spectators. In 1809 a fire had resulted in the complete gutting of Drury Lane, a new building able to house nine-hundred and twenty spectators in the pit alone replaced it in 1812. Coleridge’s Remorse was the first new mainpiece to be staged in this re-built theatre. Lamb’s Prologue to Remorse may have been quick to address those who derided ‘our modern theatres unwieldy size’, but Coleridge’s play would certainly have struggled to contend with Drury Lane’s poor visibility and acoustics.28 There was, for starters, an unusually narrow stage proscenium (around thirty-three feet), for a disproportionately large auditorium. Interestingly however, Coleridge refrains from betraying any sense of intimidation related to such a densely filled and cavernous space (where the predilection was clearly for the spectacular entertainments Coleridge himself derided). Instead, in his Spanish plays, Coleridge shrewdly deconstructs the exoticism and visual luxury his audiences would have anticipated. In his Spanish plays he asserts a highly charged, metatheatrical commentary of his own, firmly linking the stage to the contemporary political scene. Central to both Osorio and Remorse is the conjuring scene. In this scene, Coleridge problematises audiences’ dangerous dependency on the visual, by exposing the ways in which the power of appearances could instill false beliefs. In Osorio, Velez imagines the entire scene as a performance in its own right. He describes it as ‘excellently manag’d’, and applauds Albert as ‘a fellow that could play the Sorcerer, | With such a Grace and terrible 26

27 28

Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Biographia Literaria, II, p. 232. ‘Prologue, by C. Lamb’, ll. 1-2, Spoken by Mr Carr. See Remorse (Stage), p. 1070.

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Majesty’.29 The irony of course, is that Velez has been enthralled by the illusion more thoroughly than he recognises, being unable to penetrate the narrative of criminal denunciation underlying Albert’s dramatics. The massive structure of the Drury Lane playhouse afforded Coleridge the opportunity to nudge audiences into an awareness of the deceitful, as well as liberating, effects of theatrical illusion. Furthermore, in Velez’s perception of the scene as if it were a ‘play-within-a play’, Coleridge’s warning assumes a paratheatrical pertinence. Audiences were encouraged to perceive the play’s action as reverberating beyond the walls of the Drury Lane playhouse, and across into the larger political stage of nineteenth-century Europe. The significance of the conjuring scene is underscored by the detail with which Coleridge treats it in his manuscript notes. The annotations to Osorio curiously describe Act III as ‘miserably undramatic, or rather untragic’.30 This raises the question of why Coleridge would preserve the scene as the keystone to Remorse. In a sense however, it is the very ‘undramatic’ nature of the scene which explains its centrality to the drama. As Coleridge would go on to explain in his annotations, ‘A scene of magic is introduced, in which no single person on the Stage has the least Faith — all tho’ in different ways think or know it to be a Trick/ consequently, etc.’31 In other words, the scene functions as a warning of the need to translate ‘seeing’ into active ‘recognition’, spectatorship into intellectual participation. This emphasis on magic and trickery offers a critical commentary on the potential for deceitful political turnings. In 1813, the scene could stand as a metaphor for the very sleight-of-hand with which Napoleon seemed to control central Europe. As such, Coleridge subtly, but persuasively, argues against his audiences’ lax preference for spectacle, and in favour of the political usefulness of a discourse of demystification. William Jewett suggests that the conjuring scene fails to bring its audience to a united response; and rather, that the audience reacts through a range of motives and effects.32 Unfortunately, Jewett does not go any further in specifically justifying this ‘fractured’ effect. But if we read the scene as a lesson in how to avoid being taken in by political deceit, Jewett’s observation of this ‘variousness’ in response, can be re-conceived as an example of the self-interrogation deemed to be the necessary preliminary to social action. In Coleridgean terms, ‘the absolute principle’ constituting a cultured nation was 29 30 31 32

Osorio, III.i.159-160, p. 103, my italics. Osorio, ‘Annotations’, III.i.116, p. 158. Ibid. William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 100.

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the well-informed individual, who could resist the temptation for complacency by independently engaging in active reflection.33 Indeed, the anticipated, spectacular climax of Coleridge’s drama turns out to be the very opposite of what it originally promised. Although the conjuring scene may build up to a dramatic musical chorus, the stage directions ultimately undermine its potential for self-realization: Gong sounds & the incense on the altar takes fire suddenly, and an illuminated picture of ALVAR’s assassination is discovered, and having remained a few seconds is then hidden by ascending flames.34 The visual crux represented by the assassination picture hardly makes its appearance before it is hastily removed from the public eye. Ironically, it is this very reluctance to privilege the visual which imbues the scene with the ‘poetical merit’ Coleridge conceded to it.35 In a play in which deception is an overarching theme, the ambivalent stage illusion produced by the conjuring scene shows Coleridge employing theatrical deception as a means of schooling audiences into an awareness of political deceit. To take the words of Don Cevallos, the scene is nothing short of an attempt to expose ‘Napoleon’s blind ambition’ and ‘the perfidious and deceitful arts by which the Emperor has made the mad progress we have seen’.36 In Britons, Forging the Nation (1992), Linda Colley underscores the importance of education to the development of British national identities, explaining the need to actively ‘learn a commitment to Great Britain’.37 Coleridge exploits the popularity of drama in order to deliver his own didactic stress on the importance of political self-awareness. According to Lamb, the huge audience capacity of Drury Lane offered unparalleled opportunities for addressing ‘the nation’s ear’, vastly superior to ‘some prescrib’d Lyceum’s petty sphere’.38 His claim is worth noting. Between 1809 and the re-opening of Drury Lane in the autumn of 1812, the company had been relocated to the much smaller site of the Lyceum, with its maximum seating capacity of one-thousand and five hundred spectators. It is significant that although the concept of ‘the masses’ prompts an obvious

33

34 35 36

37 38

See Essay II, The Friend, in The Collected Works, ed. by Barbara Rooke, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), I, p. 16. for Coleridge’s notion of ‘fundamental instruction’, referring men to their ‘absolute principles’. Remorse (Stage), stage directions, p. 1106. Osorio, Annotations, III.i.116, p. 158. Don Pedro Cevallos, An Exposure of the Arts and Machinations which Led to the Usurpation of the Crown of Spain (London: Printed for J.J. Stockdale, 1808), p. 66. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale, 1992; 2005), p. 295. ‘Prologue, by C. Lamb’, ll. 5-6. See Remorse (Stage), p. 1070.

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anxiety in Coleridge’s prose writings, Drury Lane’s highly contingent, unstable mass of theatre-goers attracted his interest nonetheless. The Peninsular War was bringing home stories of the power of mass resistance, often idealising the Spanish peasantry in its refusal to submit to the French yoke. This nationalist solidarity inspired the British imagination, but also raised nervous questions concerning political leadership. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Iberian Peninsula served as a sort of testing-ground for the importance attached to public opinion, and the likeliest means of leading the masses. Jewett’s recognition of the range of ‘effects and motives’ acting upon the characters of Coleridge’s play can be usefully extended to the theatregoers of Drury Lane. By anticipating the existence of different levels of political consciousness in his audience, Coleridge could direct his political import to those contemplative men he believed best entitled to the leadership of the unruly masses. His hierarchical notion of political power could thus be applied to even the unpredictable theatrical multitudes. The Georgian theatre’s tripartite division into box, pit, and gallery enabled the energy of mass audience-response to be reassuringly channelled and contained. Coleridge’s attachment to the theatre was to a large extent ideological, but financial considerations were also important. The commercial opportunities afforded to Coleridge by theatrical writing demand investigation, particularly in relation to Remorse as a play with decidedly Gothic trappings. Coleridge’s scenery shifts from characteristically ‘wild and mountainous Country’, the Valdez Castle and its Hall of Armoury, the interior of a Chapel, a ‘dark’ cavern, and ‘mountains by moonlight’.39 Strikingly, this Gothicism was accompanied by a Spanish setting, dismissed by the British Review as an attempt to seize on the fashion for ‘anything relating to the Peninsula’. To what extent then, was Coleridge’s Spanish Gothic a gesture to commercial pressures? And on the other hand, to what extent did it offer a distinct ideological apparatus with which to think about Spanish politics? The critic for the British Review offered a fruitful delineation of the British interest in the Peninsula in the early nineteenth century: ‘Together with our victorious dispatches we have Spanish buttons, chocolate, mantles, fans, feathers, and bolderos; was it then to be supposed that the zeal of managers, shouldering each other in the eager discharge of a new office, should forget to provide us with a Spanish play?’40 Such expansive listing testifies to a contemporary commodification of all things Spanish, making it

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40

See esp. stage directions to II.i, p.1089, III.ii, p.1101, III.iii, p.1107, IV.i, p.1113, IV.iii. p.1121, in Remorse (Stage). British Review, in The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, I, p. 222.

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virtually impossible to distinguish whether the Spanish vogue was ultimately about money or ideology. Yet, whilst eager stage managers are ironically described akin to military leaders competing for box-office success, the stage could be, and had been, successfully used to probe the link between imperial and commercial identities. Colman the Younger’s Inkle and Yarico (1787) had proved very popular, exploring the stage’s capacity for provocative social enquiry. Inkle, as a character ‘who risques his life, for a chance of advancing his interest. Always advantage in view!’, fails to distinguish between people and commodities.41 In the course of the play, Colman challenges the rhetoric of empire and its confusion of monetary and moral values. As suggested by the critic from the British Review, the Peninsular War seemed to exemplify such indeterminacy. The exoticism of ‘chocolate’ and ‘feathers’ for instance, can be read as a synecdoche for Spain’s South American colonies, and British interests in tapping into those new markets. In an essay on early nineteenth-century Mexico, the geographer Alexander von Humboldt made clear links between the ideology of the Spanish Revolution and the call for independence in South America. As von Humboldt concisely put it, ‘the prosperity of the whites is intimately connected with that of the copper-coloured race’.42 The interest in Spain opened up to Britons a new kind of commercial modernity, stretching as far as South America, and brought its own set of ideological challenges.43 Coleridge’s decision to write ‘a Spanish play’ was filtered through a dual political and commercial perception of Spain. In his Marxist reading of Osorio, Daniel Watkins interprets Coleridge’s setting as a reflection of the British state in the 1790s, claiming that the ‘historical cross-currents that politicise the text’ are descriptive of the tensions between ‘old and new worlds’, that is, Renaissance and Romantic bourgeois cultures.44 Watkins’s interpretation sees Coleridge actively challenging aristocratic values, 41

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43

44

George Colman, Inkle and Yarico: An Opera in Three Acts (London: Printed for G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1787), I.1, p. 8. Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay in the Kingdom of New Spain: With Physical Selections and Maps Founded on Astronomical Observations, and Trigonometrical and Barometrical Measurements, trans. by John Black, 4 vols (1811), IV, p. 282. On the development of nineteenth-century British imperial ideologies and Britain’s interests in South America, see Joselyn Almeida, ‘Conquest and Slavery in Robert Southey’s Madoc and James Montgomery’s The West Indies’ (pp. 151-166), and Nigel Leask ‘Southey’s Madoc: Re-imagining the Conquest of America’ (pp. 133-150), both in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism ed. by Lynda Pratt (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006). Daniel Watkins, A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (Florida: University of Florida Press, 1993), pp. 21-38.

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especially in his characterisation of Albert as one whose involvement with the Belgic states brings him in line with a rising middle-class consciousness. His analysis usefully demonstrates the need to combine the historical and geographical facets of the Spanish imaginary. Nevertheless, Watkins’s rather generalised reading of the commercial and political meanings underlying Coleridge’s text seems to elide the role religion plays in the formation of Coleridge’s putatively bourgeois ideology. As Colley famously argues, in the ‘new world’ of eighteenth-century Britain, national coherence was largely achieved through the unifying effect of the Protestant religion.45 Indeed, the chronological origins of even the ‘old world’ British Empire were often traced to Elizabeth I and Tudor maritime exploits associated with launching Britain as a Protestant world-power. The values of liberty, free and rational enquiry, self-discipline, and middle-class sensibility were part and parcel of Coleridge’s dissenting beliefs. What Watkins pinpoints as an ‘aristocratic challenge’ can therefore be more usefully re-figured as ‘a religious affirmation’, as applicable to Coleridge’s elitism in 1813 as to his outspokenly more radical beliefs of the 1790s. Religion featured prominently among the constituents of Britain’s imperial identity. To Coleridge, the freedom of religious consciousness associated with Protestantism was a key aspect of Britain’s political success. Spain, by contrast, was largely defined by its commitment to the Catholic religion. In Southey’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797), religion serves as the main signifier of Spain’s ‘alien’ status. Southey writes that ‘much of the depravity of the people may be attributed to the nature of their religion’.46 In Georgian Britain, Catholicism was often reduced to the stereotype of a Gothic, ‘demonic’ other, unnervingly associated with politico-religious unrest in the United Kingdom as much as in Spain. Publications, such as John Joseph Stockdale’s The History of the Inquisitions (1810) showed clear points of intersection between an interest in Catholicism and the question of Anglo-Irish Union.47 Coleridge, despite his promotion of Protestantism, takes a considerably nuanced approach to Catholicism in his depiction of Spain as an ideological site. Most strikingly, he introduces in Osorio a notion of political trickery that exploits religious faith in more general terms. This enables him to reconceptualise the Catholic religion as a victim in its own right. Keen to 45 46

47

See Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, pp. 11-43. Robert Southey, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, with some account of Spanish and Portugueze Poetry (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797), p. 43. J.J. Stockdale, The History of the Inquisitions: Including the Secret Transactions of those Historical Tribunals (London: Printed for J.J. Stockdale, 1810). See ‘Advertisement’, p. v.

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seduce Maria into a false belief that her beloved has died, Osorio construes a scene marked by all the paraphernalia of Catholic ritual. Complete with ‘strange music’, ‘fumes of Frankincense, and mummery’, and of course, the iconic ‘Portrait’, Osorio imagines an unmitigated assault on Maria’s superstitious sensibilities.48 His ingenuity is testament to his villainy. It is worth observing however, his opening concession that Maria ‘has no faith in holy Church’, since ‘Her Lover school’d her in some newer nonsense’.49 Here, Osorio obviously refers to the Protestant cause associated with Albert’s heroic exploits in the Netherlands. Consequently, when Maria is finally exposed to Albert’s assumed sorcery, her response appropriately belongs to a decidedly religious register: MARIA This is some trick — I know, it is a trick — Yet my weak Fancy, and these bodily creepings, Would fain give substance to the shadow.50

Maria self-consciously attempts to interpret the scene with a knowing sense of scepticism. Poignantly, her language goes as far as to suggest an attempt to shake herself free of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation: that the wine and bread of holy communion quite literally become the blood and body of Christ, ‘giv[ing] substance to the shadow’. Catholicism is still critiqued through its association with a narrow mind-set, but interestingly, Coleridge posits Protestantism’s role not so much to castigate, as to liberate. It is Maria’s conversion to this liberating Protestant cause that saves her from falling prey to the delusions engineered by Osorio. By the staging of Remorse, Spanish Catholicism was gradually acquiring a stronger hold of the British imagination. The Napoleonic regime, in its advancement of secularization, posed the greatest challenge to the Catholic religion since the Reformation. In Spain, Napoleon’s imposed Constitution of 1812 had entailed a confiscation of religious property and the suppression of all religious congregations. As a result, Catholicism was invested with a newly-acquired sense of resisting Napoleonic tyranny. No longer merely a sign of personal faith, Catholicism became associated with membership to a society actively rebelling against French oppression. This changing perception of the Catholic religion is depicted in Remorse through a subtle reworking of the symbolic import of the Inquisition, which seeks to purge it of its all-too reductive Gothic stereotype. 48 49 50

Osorio, II.i.35-40, p. 82. Osorio, II.i.29, 30, p. 81. Osorio, III.i.112-114, p. 101, my italics.

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By comparison with the 1797 text, in 1813 Coleridge invested the Inquisition with a noticeably greater degree of agency. In Osorio, Francesco introduces Alhadra with a sly, half-ironic emphasis on his susceptibility for narratives with a human interest: FRANCESCO

But that this woman with most passionate outcries, Kneeling, and holding forth her infants to me, So work’d upon me, who (you know, my Lord!) Have human frailties, and am tender-hearted, That I came with her.51

This moving sentimental tableau of Alhadra’s supplication for the Inquisitor’s mercy is altogether excised from the 1813 script. In Remorse, the Inquisitor, renamed Monviedro, is recast as much more direct, authoritative and confident in his stature. Unlike his foil Francesco, Monviedro shows no interest in exciting Ordonio’s flattery. Also absent from Remorse is Osorio’s attempt to distract Francesco’s suspicions by tempting him with the prospect of a bishopric. This reimagining of the Inquisition proves significant in Act III, wherein Coleridge inserts a new opening scene to announce that Monviedro and his spies will be observing Alvar’s sorcery from behind the scenes. As a result, in contradistinction to the extended delays and near coincidental arrest of Albert in Osorio, Remorse dramatises the Inquisition’s prompt apprehension of Alvar as soon as the altar takes fire. Coleridge’s portrayal of an uncompromisingly authoritarian Catholic police may appear surprising in light of the religio-political changes occurring between 1797 and 1813, but it was not incompatible with the sympathies coalescing around Catholic Spain. Stripping from the 1813 text the almost ridiculous characterisation of the pathetic Francesco, Coleridge commits himself to a much more serious critique of authoritarian oppression, which goes beyond religious specificity. Unlike Maria, Teresa is not specifically identified with the Protestant faith, yet her Catholicism is as far apart from the tyranny of the Inquisition as if it were a different religion altogether. Akin to the decision to moderate Alhadra’s once indiscriminate call for her sword to be ‘Wet with the blood of all the House of Velez!’ into ‘the life-blood of the son of Valdez!’, in 1813 Coleridge distinguishes between the different rungs in the Catholic hierarchy.52 Above all else, it is the corrupt manipulation of power and its tyrannical (mis)application which excites Coleridge’s interest, not the particularities of its Catholic dress. 51 52

Osorio, I.i.116-119, p. 65. Compare Osorio, IV.iii.30, p.129, and Remorse (Stage), IV.iii.25, p. 1122, my italics.

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Related to Coleridge’s re-working of the Catholic threat in Remorse is his newly-stressed emphasis on Alvar’s assumption of a Moorish identity. In Osorio, Albert makes his first appearance ‘(diguis’d as a Morescoe, and in Moorish garments)’.53 For Remorse however, Coleridge wrote an entirely new opening scene, in which Alvar first appears ‘wrapt in a Boat Cloak’.54 It is only as the scene unfolds that Alvar reveals a self-conscious determination to ‘linger here | In the disguise of a Moorish chieftain’.55 In the latter version of the text, Alvar’s choice of identification is prominently foregrounded. Greenough had responded to Coleridge’s manuscript draft by questioning ‘the reason of Albert being so clothed’, and Coleridge answered with a note that all the Moorish costumes and garments had been prohibited under the pain of death.56 In Remorse, the deliberate staging of Alvar’s Moorish identity highlights Coleridge’s intent to underline the independence of character and the rebellious, defiant nature of Alvar’s gesture. In fact, it represents so successful an attempt to incorporate otherness, that Ordonio mistakes Alvar for being entirely ‘other’. Unable to distinguish between Alvar and Zulimez, Ordonio is reduced to asking for clarification as to which ‘one of you’ sent the cryptic message.57 Coleridge’s newly-stressed emphasis on his theme of disguise encouraged theatre-audiences to conceive their sense of identity for themselves. Like Alvar, they were prompted to decide how they wished to be placed in the social network. Choice was a vital element in the constitution of identities, both onstage and off. One of the most significant, yet apparently unnoticed transformations to the 1797 playscript, is Coleridge’s re-casting of Maurice as Zulimez. In a letter to William Bowles, dated as late as October 1797, Coleridge admits to a frankly hazy conceptualization of the nationality of Albert’s servant. Initially imagined as an Englishman (named Warville), Maurice then assumes a German identity. Coleridge himself admitted that ‘what Maurice does or can do, is not quite so clear’.58 Zulimez meanwhile, came to be delineated in much stronger hues, defined by the stage directions from the outset, as ‘a Morescoe’. Zulimez is thus saved from his counterpart’s embarrassing attempt to moderate the Moorish thirst for vengeance. The presumably Christian Maurice who ‘leaps in’ to save Francesco from the wrath of the Moors, advocating forgiveness and the justice of God, aggravates the already incised Alhadra with his half53 54 55 56 57 58

Osorio, stage directions, I.i.246, p. 73. Remorse (Stage), stage directions, I.i, p. 1075. Remorse (Stage), I.i.77-78, p. 1077. Osorio, Annotations, I.i.258, pp. 153-4. Remorse (Stage), II.ii.45, p. 1096. Collected Letters, I, p. 356 (Letter 211).

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speculative insistence that ‘Mahomet taught mercy and forgiveness. | I am sure he did!’59 In the equivalent scene in Remorse, both the Inquisitor and Zulimez are noticeably absent. When Zulimez finally makes his reappearance, he is seen alongside Valdez, symbolically standing at the head of the armed peasants and servants that enter the stage at the end of the scene. The social responsibility accorded to the unlikely duo of Valdez (aged patriarch) and Zulimez (symbolic of the oppressed brethren), denies any rhetoric of mutual exclusivity. According to the play’s final vision, social transformation required a concerted effort to redress political suspicions and respect individual autonomy. This image of social cohesion would have echoed with poignant forcefulness within the walls of the theatre, an arena which, in its own right, sough to promote participatory patriotism. Coleridge’s revisions to Osorio and its Gothic referencing of the Catholic threat suggest that he was actively engaged in the contemporary vogue to purge Spain of its infamous associations with the ‘Black Legend’. In early nineteenth-century Britain, there was an acute interest in replacing Spain’s Gothic stereotype with a more convincing, factually accurate account of the Iberian Peninsula. The Peninsular War was after all, transforming Spain into the battlefield where British sons raised their bastions of liberty against the Napoleonic regime. Between 1797 and 1813, Coleridge’s Gothic trappings were increasingly replaced by a much more pronounced interest in Spanish history and a re-evaluation of the superannuated cultural memories attached to Spain. In Georgian Britain, drama became a medium for the rewriting of history. Coleridge was attracted to the theatre as a space in which moral sentiments could be exhibited and legitimated, offering him an ideal forum in which to explore the politico-philosophical implications of ‘remorse’. The new opening written for the 1813 playtext significantly highlights the moral weight attached to ‘remorse’ through Zulimez’s claim that: ZULIMEZ REMORSE is as the heart, in which it grows: If that be gentle it drops balmy dews Of true repentance, but if proud and gloomy, It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost Weeps only tears of poison!60

The epigrammatic quality of Zulimez’s speech is confirmed by Coleridge’s decision to place the lines as an epigraph to the printed edition of his play. 59 60

Osorio, V.i.83-84, p. 137. Remorse (Stage), I.i.20-24, pp. 1075-6.

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What the incision overlooks however, is Alvar’s instinctive rejection, rather than avowal, of Zulimez’s definition: ‘And of a brother, | Dare I hold this, unprov’d? nor make one effort | To save him?’ he asks.61 Whilst it has become something of a critical commonplace to associate Alvar with a programme of inflicting remorse upon Ordonio, the 1813 text actually dramatises an instinctive shrinking away from such practice. Like Othello, committed to ‘see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove’, Alvar cannot hold Zulimez’s claim ‘unprov’d’.62 Inflicting remorse is not so much the policy he espouses, as a policy he seeks to test. That Alvar is more interested in ‘saving’ Ordonio than extolling his revenge has been accepted by most readings, but what has often been neglected is that from the outset, Alvar is acutely aware of the psychological and political limitations inherent in the philosophy of remorse.63 The OED etymology for ‘remorse’ records that its senses related to compassion and pity had become virtually obsolete by the early eighteenth century.64 The fact that the term’s more emotive associations had been waning suggests that remorse was a prime candidate for testing Coleridge’s interest in the affective potential of the theatrical space. Sheridan’s rejection of Osorio had confined Coleridge’s early playtext to being liminally poised between the page and stage. By comparison, its study of ‘remorse’ was ambivalently positioned between the word’s dominant connotation with regret, and lingering associations with sympathetic sentimental affect. Catherine Burroughs’s work on the theatrical closet points to a strong interrelationship between closet dramas and social and theatrical performances.65 Perhaps a similar project is needed in order to ‘uncloset’ the latent meanings of ‘remorse’ and assess its changing political valence between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is after all, in the nature of closet dramas, such as Osorio, to create stories that exist beyond the theatre. Having revised his early playtext, it is almost as if by staging a play entitled Remorse, Coleridge were attempting to re-invest the concept with its lost sympathetic attachments.

61 62

63

64

65

Remorse (Stage), I.i.24b-26a, p. 1076. William Shakespeare, Othello, III.iii.193, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. by E.A.J. Honigmann (London: Arden Shakespeare.1997:2003), p. 220. See Jewett, p. 109 and his claim that Albert’s plot of remorse is ‘an extension of his fight for freedom’. “remorse, n”, OED Online [accessed 4 September 2008] Catherine Burroughs, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

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According to Julie Carlson, remorse was politically significant as a pervasive response to the French Revolution, gendered as a state of mind from which women were decisively excluded.66 The first half of Carlson’s assertion is certainly borne out by the 1797 playtext, but if we bring in the sympathetic associations underlying remorse as sorrow and regret, we end up with the surprising alignment of Coleridge and Alhadra. In a letter to Thelwall in October 1797, Coleridge significantly projected his feelings of dejection onto his characterisation of Alhadra, whom he affectionately calls ‘my Moorish woman’.67 In 1797, Alhadra was a figure of revolutionary zeal and disillusionment, whose patriotic speech provides a forceful conclusion to the play: ALHADRA […] Knew I an hundred Men Despairing, but not palsied by despair, This arm should shake the Kingdoms of the World; The deep foundation of iniquity Should sink away, Earth groaning from beneath them;68

Earlier that year, Coleridge had claimed that ‘Most of our patriots are tavern & parlour Patriots, that will not avow their principles by any decisive action’.69 It is this sense of unfulfilled potential which defines the use of the subjunctive mood to structure Alhadra’s speech. Despite the fact that Alhadra is clearly able to incite action, her energy remains frustratingly constrained by those ‘hundred Men […] palsied by despair’. Coleridge may not condone Alhadra’s revolutionary resort to violence, but he agrees that complacency was equally, if not more, destructive. The despair associated with remorse brought with it a dangerous predisposition to paralysis. Alhadra is not so much excluded from the politics of remorse, as much as she is a prophet warning of its shortcomings. Nevertheless, Carlson is surely correct in her claim that Coleridge believed women should stand apart from the political scene. He characterised politics as public, contemplative, and above all else, decidedly masculine. In the 1813 version of the play, it is Alvar, rather than Alhadra, who is given the final word. Instead, audiences witness Alhadra fatally stabbing Ordonio onstage, before being taken away by the Moors in anticipation of her arrest. The Peninsular War had decisively redefined expectations associated with 66

67 68 69

Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Collected Letters, I, p. 350 (Letter 209). Osorio, V.ii.205-210, p. 148. Collected Letters, I, p. 305 (Letter 176).

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gendered action. Amongst the most striking news items of the war, was how women, and even children, were providing active examples of patriotic fervour. In Vaughan’s Narrative of the Siege of Zaragoza (1809), ‘an act of heroism performed by a female’ takes centre stage. Vaughan enthusiastically relates how Augustina ‘rushed forward over the wounded, and slain, snatched a match from the hand of a dead artilleryman, and fired off a 26 pounder, then jumping upon the gun made a solemn vow never to quit it alive during the siege.’70 Augustina acts by instinct. Alhadra’s murder of Ordonio is similarly figured by the stage directions as occuring ‘suddenly’.71 The active verbs ‘rushed’, ‘snatched’ and ‘jumping’, which define Augustina’s assertive response to the siege, confirm that in 1813, Coleridge’s ‘Moorish woman’ no longer needed to await the coming of those reclusive ‘tavern & parlour Patriots’. She could take action into her own hands. And this seems to have deeply disturbed Coleridge. Having publicly translated psychological remorse into physical action, Alhadra is necessarily stripped of her final lines, and excluded from the play’s closing tableau. In her place, Coleridge inserts the domestic Teresa, kneeling to Valdez, her ‘Father’, a paragon of female submission to the re-established patriarchy. In the final lines of the 1813 text, Alvar denounces ‘dire REMORSE’ as a force which acts upon ‘our guilty hopes, and selfish fears’.72 Ultimately, remorse effects a sort of entrapment. Alvar may desperately attempt to call up ‘one pang of true Remorse!’, but as Ordonio explains, it is a futile scheme: ORDONIO Can it give up the dead, or recompact A mangled body? mangled-dash’d to atoms! Not all the blessings of an host of angels Can blow away a desolate widow’s curse! And though thou spill thy heart’s blood for atonement, It will not weigh against an orphan’s tear.73

There is no denying Ordonio’s frightful insight. Remorse could not reclaim men, but might merely confirm their tragic despair. Yet, as the differences between the 1797 and 1813 versions of Coleridge’s Spanish play suggestively show, history, as an open narrative, could look beyond such determinism, offering a unique process of revisionism able to ‘bring the dead to life again’. At the same time, Coleridge’s reworking of his early playtext illustrates how 70 71 72 73

Charles Vaughan, Narrative of the Siege of Zaragoza, 4th edn (London: 1809), p. 15. Remorse (Stage), V.i, stage directions, p. 1131. Remorse (Stage), V.i.219-220, p. 1132. Remorse (Stage), V.i.124-130, p. 1128.

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the Peninsular War helped refashion Britons’ understanding of the Spanish ‘other’, from a traditional rival into a new-found ally in the war against Napoleonic aggression.

Bibliography Baillie, Joanna, ‘Introductory Discourse’, A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy [1798], int. by Caroline Franklin (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996) Boswell, James, On the Profession of a Player: Three Essays (Suffolk: Elkin Mathews & Marrot Ltd, 1929) Brougham, Henry, ‘Exposition of the Practices and Machinations which led to the Usurpation of the Crown of Spain, and the Means adopted by the Emperor of the French to carry it into execution. By Don Pedro Cevallos, First Secretary of State and Despatches to his Catholic Majesty Ferdinand VII’, The Edinburgh Review, 25 (October 1808), 215-234. Burroughs, Catherine, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) Carlson, Julie, ‘An Active Imagination: Coleridge and the Politics of Dramatic Reform’, Modern Philology, 86.1 (1988), 22-33. ——, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) ——, ‘Remorse for Jacobin Youth’, The Wordsworth Circle, 24.3 (1993), 130-33. ——, ‘Trying Sheridan’s Pizarro’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 38 (1996), 359-78. Cevallos, Pedro, An Exposure of the Arts and Machinations which led to the Usurpation of The Crown of Spain, And the Means pursued by Bonaparte To Carry His Views into effect (London: J.J. Stockdale, 1808). Coleridge, Samuel, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). ——, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956)

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——, Essays On His Own Times, ed. by David V. Erdman, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge III, general editor Kathleen Coburn, 3 vols (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) ——, The Friend, ed. by Barbara E. Rooke, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge IV, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) ——, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge I, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) ——, Lectures on Literature (1808-1819), ed. by R. A. Foakes, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge V (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987) ——, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957) ——, Osorio, ed. by J.C.C Mays, in Poetical Works: Plays III.1, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge XVI (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) ——, Remorse, ed. by J.C.C. Mays, in Poetical Works: Plays III.2, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge XVI (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) ——, The Watchman [1796], ed. by Lewis Patton, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge II. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) Carr, Raymond, Spain 1808-1975, 2 nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London: Yale, 1992; 2005) Colman, George (the Younger), Inkle and Yarico: An Opera in Three Acts (London: Printed for G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1787) Donohue, Joseph, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970) Fox, Arnold, ‘The Political and Biographical Background of Coleridge’s Osorio’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 61 (1962), 258-67. Fremont-Barnes, Gregory, The Napoleonic Wars: The Peninsular Wars 1807-1814 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002) Humboldt, Alexander von, Political Essay in the Kingdom of New Spain: With Physical Selections and Maps Founded on Astronomical Observations, and Trigonometrical and Barometrical Measurements, trans. by John Black, 4 vols (London: 1811) Jackson, J. R. de J, Coleridge; The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970)

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Jacob, William, Travels in the South of Spain, in Letters Written A.D. 1809 and 1810 (London: J. Johnson and Co. and W. Miller, 1811) Jewett, William, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (London: Cornell University Press, 1997) Mill, James, ‘Lettre aux Espagnols-Americains. Par un de leurs Compatriotes’, The Edinburgh Review, 26 (January 1809), 277-311. Moody, Jane, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Moore, James, A Narrative of the Campaign of the British Army in Spain (London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1809) Moore, John David, ‘Coleridge and the “Modern Jacobinal Drama”: Osorio, Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge’s Critique of the Stage, 1797-1816’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982), 443-64., O’ Hayden, John, The Romantic Reviewers: 1802-1824 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) Otway, Thomas, Venice Preserv’d (London: 1682) Parker, Reeve, ‘Osorio’s Dark Employments: Tricking out Coleridgean Tragedy’, Studies in Romanticism, 33 (1994), 119-60. Pratt, Lynda, Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006) The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers: Part A: The Lake Poets, ed. by Donald H. Reiman, 2 vols (London: Garland Publishing Inc, 1972) Russell, Gillian, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Atlanta: Amsterdam, 2000) ——, ‘Spanish Stages: British Romantic tragedy and the theatrical politics of Spain, 1808-1823’, European Romantic Review, 19.1 (2008), 19-32. Semple, Robert, A Second Journey in Spain in the Spring of 1809, with twenty-four illustrative figures of the Costume, and Manners of the Inhabitants of Several of the Spanish Provinces (London: R. Baldwin, 1809) ——, Observations on a Journey through Spain and Italy to Naples, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Printed for C. and R. Baldwin, 1808) Shakespeare, William, Othello [1623], The Arden Shakespeare, ed. by E.A.J. Honigmann, 3rd edn (London: Arden Shakespeare: 1997, 2003) Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, Pizarro (London: 1799) Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1759)

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Southey, Robert, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, with some Account of Spanish and Portugueze Poetry (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797) Stockdale, J.J. The History of the Inquisition: Including the Secret Transactions of those Historical Tribunals (London: Printed for J.J. Stockdale, 1810) Vaughan, Charles, Narrative of the Siege of Zaragoza, 4th edn (London: 1809) Watkins, Daniel, A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (Florida: University of Florida Press, 1993) Wilson, Kathleen, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2002) Woodring, Carl, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961)

PART II

Trades and Exchanges

Nanora Sweet

The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in Felicia Hemans and José María Blanco White This essay considers the ability of Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) and (Joseph) José María Blanco White (1775-1841) to pull readers into an uncanny geography and even cosmography, but attenuating emotional anchorage — a world, as Hemans wrote White, that is ‘one scene of farewells.’ Convergence marked their intertwined careers and correspondence, fueled by each writer’s Anglo-Hispanic preoccupations. These convergences began with each writer’s investment in Spain’s War of Independence. Previously a priest in the Chapel Royal, Blanco came to support the Junta and fled Spain for England at its fall in 1810. From 1808 to 1813, Hemans followed her brothers’ action in the Peninsular War, publishing her second book at age fifteen in 1808, a progress-of-empire entitled England and Spain. Her third book, the 1812 The Domestic Affections, took its title with some irony from a long poem therein of foreign campaign and domestic impoverishment. Hemans’ sense of domestic exile found company, she wrote White in 1829, in the Spaniard’s writings of exile from home: a sort of chiasmus that marks their cultural relations. The work she regarded as her best, the 1825 The Forest Sanctuary, was inspired by White (it quoted from his 1825 ‘Alcazar in Seville’) and also by Coleridge’s drama of CounterReformation Spain, Remorse. Hemans attributed to White the consciousness behind this meditative epic of Atlantic crossing and Protestant conversion: of Old World and New; of Hapsburg Spain and (as in Remorse) the empire’s holdings in Protestant Low Countries (a proxy for England); of America, South and North.

The unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home’1 – these things have made the world seem to me like one scene of farewells. F.H. to J.B.W., 10 May 18292

José Blanco White (1775-1841) and Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) pursued careers as English writers with a foreign inflection and a sensation of the unheimlich, an uncanny recollection simultaneously of home and banishment from home that comes with renewed trauma and the force of déjà vu. Each 1

2

Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home’, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 445-55 (p. 448). Qtd in Blanco White, The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, ed. by John Hamilton Thom, 3 vols (London: Chapman, 1845), I, 465: afterwards cited as ‘Thom.’

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experienced the ‘unhomelike’ in a British empire expanding into formerly Spanish seigniories and spheres of influence in the Old World and New — an expansion that Hemans understood as the alienation of both imperial subject and displaced woman (‘world and home’).3 For her, Blanco White’s Januslike writings, especially his English Letters from Spain, seemed uncannily familiar: ‘you will understand all those undefined longings,’ she wrote during her first year alone in Liverpool with three sons. A husbandless wife and mother and busy professional writer, Hemans lost both her own mother and place in the family home in Wales in 1828. She and three of her sons sought refuge in Liverpool’s liberal circles with friends and sponsors like Unitarian philanthropist William Roscoe and cosmopolitan translator Rose D’Aguilar Lawrence. Ordained to the clergy, elected to Seville’s elite Colegio Mayor, fallen into sceptic dissidence in Madrid, José María Blanco y Crespo embraced Spain’s power vacuum in 1809. He joined with fellow dissidents and traveling Britons, especially Lord and Lady Holland, in floating ideas for a new Spanish constitution. On the fall of Spain’s revolutionary Junta in early 1810, Blanco sought refuge in London’s liberal circles, with Holland House the first of several way-stations for this ‘self-banished Spaniard’ who soon was charged with the care of a natural son, Ferdinand.4 In the early 1820s, 3

4

Bhabha’s earlier work on the uncanny is represented in the following essay by Diego Saglia concerning a different hispanophile work by Hemans (The Siege of Valencia), in which a feminine heimlich of the hearth forms a binary with a racially ‘Other’, tacitly male unheimlich: ‘“O My Mother Spain”: The Peninsular War, Family Matters, and the Practice of Romantic Nation-Writing’, ELH, 35 (1998), 363-93 (p. 369). Saglia draws on Bhabha’s ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-7, where Bhabha counterpoises ‘the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other’ (p. 2). In Bhabha’s 1997 ‘The World and the Home’, which includes a discussion of Morrison’s Beloved, the Janus-like un / heimlich forms a more simultaneous experience and reflects the irremediability of trauma and displacement always-already within the home. Useful feminist consideration of “banishment” and “homelessness” appears in the following study of a Hemans influence, Germaine de Staël, by Diedre Shauna Lynch, ‘The (Dis)locations of Romantic Nationalism: Shelley, Staël, and the Home-Schooling of Monsters’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 194-224 (pp. 200-03). See also, on Bhabha and the gendering of racial or national lines, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 47, 61-63. I thank Professor Kathy Gentile of the University of Missouri-St. Louis for first interesting me in the uncanny. Don Leucadio Doblado [Blanco White], Preface to the First Edition, Letters from Spain, 2nd edn, rev. and corr. by the author (London: Colburn, 1825), v-viii, p. vii. My alternation in calling JBW ‘Blanco’ or ‘White’ intentionally, if not quite systematically, recognizes his dual identity.

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Hemans and the now ‘Blanco White’ were both publishing in Campbell’s liberal New Monthly Magazine; at some point they began corresponding.5 To underscore the tensions surrounding their publications, both writers were touched by Tory politics as well. Hemans franked through the Bishop of St. Asaph; and her brother, an aide to Wellington and to Castlereagh’s brother, served as courier to her London publisher. The Foreign Office underwrote subscriptions to Blanco’s journal El Español for distribution in Spain and Spanish America, and he later engaged in anti-Catholic pamphleteering for the Anglican Establishment. By the later 1820s both had swerved toward conservative associations, Hemans with Walter Scott and William Wordsworth, and the now Anglican ‘Rev. Joseph Blanco White’ with Robert Southey and John Henry Newman. Southey and Newman would pull Blanco quite painfully and publicly in opposite directions over Catholic Emancipation. In the early 1830s both Hemans and White lived by turns in the household of embattled Dublin Archbishop Richard Whately. When scruples over the Trinity, Scriptural inerrancy, and Church establishment drew White further toward Unitarianism, he moved to Liverpool. There, closing the circle with Hemans, he found a measure of amity with the city’s Unitarians and was befriended by Rose Lawrence. Still wracked by an internalized inquisition, Blanco White died a member of the Renshaw Street Chapel. Buried in its grounds alongside William Roscoe, he was memorialized there in 1984 by the Mayor of Seville. From correspondence between Hemans and White, three letters — all hers, dated 1826, 1827, and 1829 — are preserved in John Hamilton Thom’s Life of Joseph Blanco White. These concern literary business, linguistic interests, and Hemans’ sense of resonance with Blanco White over exile and loss. (Hemans’ publisher John Murray may have brokered this exchange, for her first letter responds to a presentation book, and Murray published a pamphlet by White in 1826.) Written from her family home in Wales, the letter praises his ‘letters of Doblado’ and requests permission to consult him on Spanish literature. Her reply of 1827 indicates that he responded with ‘literary suggestions’. Her mother’s death delayed reply; still, she wrote, ‘the deep and true feelings’ in his works prompted her to ‘consider you, though personally unknown, a friend’. In 1829, removed to Liverpool, she recalled his ‘kindness’, expanded on her ‘exile feelings’— and requested a Spanish translation for a friend’s gift-annual project. Rose Lawrence wrote that ‘From 5

See Diego Saglia, ‘Hispanism in The New Monthly Magazine, 1821-1825’, Notes and Queries, 49.1 (2002), 49-55; and Nanora Sweet, ‘The New Monthly Magazine and the Liberalism of the 1820s’, Prose Studies, 25 (2002), 147-62; rpt. in Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, ed. by Kim Wheatley (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 147-62.

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him she heard very often’, although his side of the correspondence is missing but for one letter of 1834.6 Their roster of their common correspondents grew to include Murray, Campbell, Lawrence, the Whatelys, and also hispanist William Jacob and leading North American Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Andrews Norton. The ‘exile feelings’ of things unmoored yet déjà vu that Hemans felt between herself and White informed her longest and most ambitious nondramatic work, the 1825 The Forest Sanctuary (169 variant Spenserian stanzas, ababccbdd; 28 textual notes).7 This work invokes possibilities of home, refuge, even ecclesiastical sanctuary while simultaneously, in the way of the unheimlich, undoing these possibilities. Psychically probing, geographically wide-ranging, The Forest Sanctuary takes its Spanish conquistador and soon-to-be Protestant convert from the Andes and home through a Spain marked by auto de fé, imprisonment, torture, and banishment. Crossing the Atlantic once more, this unnamed protagonist buries his wife at sea and takes his son on a restless quest through South and North America. Hemans thought The Forest Sanctuary one of her best works, sustained and ‘fearless’ in mind and heart; in correspondence with a mutual friend, she credits Blanco White with inspiring this major work.8 Among the Englishmen Blanco met in the Madrid of 1809 was William Jacob, author of the 1811 Travels in the South of Spain.9 Jacob subsequently 6

7

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For Hemans’ letters, see Thom, I, 435, 437-38, and 465-66; Liverpool University holds the letter from JBW to FH of 30 July 1834, MS BW1/116. Rose Lawrence, ‘Recollections of Mrs. Hemans’, in The Last Autumn at a Favourite Residence (Liverpool: Robinson; London: Murray, 1836), pp. 231-419 (p. 310). Hemans often used literary ‘autograph’ as social tender and burned letters on departing for Dublin in 1831. I will cite the poem from Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 268-322: the glosses in this edition, afterwards, ‘Wolfson’, are invaluable. Early nineteenth-century editions like Murray’s of 1825 are ideal for tracking Hemans’ notes as such and as originally numbered. Also useful is the following edition, which clearly distinguishes Hemans’ notes from editorial ones: Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. by Gary Kelly (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), pp. 227-98. For Kelly’s critical introduction to the poem, see his edition’s Introduction, pp. 15-85 (pp. 39-44), afterwards, Kelly, Felicia Hemans. Hemans cited here from Henry F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, 2 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836), I, 123-24: afterwards ‘Chorley.’ The young Marian Evans found it ‘exquisite’, qtd here from Wolfson, p. 268. For another hispanophile link, this time between Hemans’ heroic martyr Theresa Eliot’s St. Theresa in Middlemarch, see John M. Anderson, ‘The Triumph of Voice in Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary’, in Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 55-73 (p. 56). Martin Murphy, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 55.

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appears as a friend of Hemans: he and his daughter visited the poet in Wales, and a correspondence ensued between the two women (it may have been the Jacobs who put Blanco and Hemans in contact). Hemans’ letter (conjecturally) to Miss Jacob, dated 20 November 1824, inquires about Mexico’s assassinated revolutionist Iturbide and the fate of his ‘widow and children’; mentions reading in ‘Captain Hall’ about South America; then says, ‘I am at present engaged on a poem of some length, the idea of which was suggested to me by some passages in your friend Mr. Blanco White’s delightful writings. It relates to the sufferings of a Spanish Protestant in the time of Philip the Second; and is supposed to be narrated by the sufferer himself, who escapes to America’.10 Hemans would claim that The Forest Sanctuary had no reference to Britain’s contemporary ‘Catholic question’ (in which Southey had enlisted the pen of Blanco White) and further that she eschewed topical poetry.11 She was however no stranger to religious controversy, as her 1820 The Sceptic shows, or to Anglo-Spanish political topicality, starting with her youthful 1808 England and Spain on the Peninsular War and ‘progress of empire’ from Spain to England. Begun in 1824, The Forest Sanctuary reflected on the Spanish Inquisition, which had been restored in 1823 on the fall of Spanish constitutionalism under the liberales.12 Hemans’ undated and unacknowledged poem on legal vigilantism in Germany, ‘A Tale of the Secret Tribunal’, also indicates an interest (nervously expressed) in legal revenants like the Inquisition.13 If indeed there is an ‘Anglo-Spanish uncanny’, it comes by the revenants and repetitions that are the uncanny, aided in the case of Hemans and White by the series of overdetermined associations between them. This geopolitical uncanny comes as a writing-over of empire, Spanish to British; a reversion of New World to Old, Protestant to Catholic, Catholic to Muslim; the Janus-like import-export of constitutional ideas between England and Spain, Holland 10

11

12

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Qtd in Chorley, I (p. 105). For a series of letters probably to Miss Jacobs, see Chorley, I, 98110. Hemans’ ‘Captain Hall’ would be Basil Hall, author of Extracts from a Journal, written on the coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1825). BW’s valued stay at Oriel College was at risk in the Controversy, Murphy, pp. 130-78; for BW’s bibliography see Murphy, pp. 245-49. It may matter that Hemans’ claim was addressed to a clergyman, Wolfson, p. 268; Hemans bibliography, pp. 611-612. Diego Saglia notes how ‘[t]he era of Philip II in the poem uncannily mirrors the period after Ferdinand VII’s restoration in 1814’. Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 179. See Nanora Sweet, ‘Felicia Hemans’ “A Tale of the Secret Tribunal”: Gothic Empire in the Age of Jeremy Bentham and Walter Scott’, European Journal of English Studies, 6.2 (2002), 159-71.

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House advising Spanish constitutionalists like Blanco, Blanco importing the term ‘liberal’ to Britain (then incorporating British traditionalists like Burke and Paley); and overarching all, a regime of Inquisition that gives truth the character of a lie.14 The Forest Sanctuary is replete with Catholic and Protestant criss-crossings in a truly Atlantic vision, with oceanic burials that cast waves on the New Continent’s prairies and tragedies and treasures of the Old World that lie uncannily déjà vu below the glassy wash of this sea/land. Hemans owes much here to her fellow unheimlich ‘Don Leucadio Doblado’, Blanco White’s pseudonym in his first major English work, his 1822 Letters from Spain — and Hemans uses that pseudonym in her citations to Blanco. The Forest Sanctuary also owes much to Hemans’ own youthful England and Spain of 1808, where Spain is the first modern global empire and thus always-already in the New World. As a rare work by Hemans with a male narrator, The Forest Sanctuary owes much to her brothers’ service in Spain during the Peninsular War and especially Thomas Henry Browne’s transatlantic stations in Martinique and Halifax. Returned from military and diplomatic service, embroiled in the Queen Caroline affair, the twicewidowed Browne heard drafts of ‘The Forest of Refuge’ and suggested the work’s final, more ecclesiastical title before turning to write his own memoirs.15 Both titles remain paradoxes; the original suggests a debt to the riddling ‘City of Refuge’ in the Book of Numbers, a refuge for accidental homicides — in Hemans’ commonplace entry on the phrase, an evocation of home always already lost.16 And if a home offers equivocal ‘refuge’ in Hemans, how might a forest offer more? The Forest Sanctuary owes much to her polylingual abilities and fields of reference in transatlantic travel (by Adam Hodgson, Washington Irving, Anne Grant, Alexander von Humboldt) and British preoccupation with Moorish/Catholic Spain (notes from Thomas Percy and John Gibson Lockhart) and especially allusions to Coleridge’s

14

15

16

See Daisy Hay, ‘Liberals, Liberales, and The Liberal’, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), 307-20, which credits English usage of the term ‘liberal’ to Blanco White’s El Español, p. 309. On Blanco and Anglo/Anglican apologists Edmund Burke and William Paley, see Murphy, pp. 78, 88, 90. See ‘A Memoir by Her Sister [Harriett Hughes]’, The Works of Mrs. Hemans, 7 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1839), I, 1-315 (p. 81): afterwards ‘Hughes’. An entirely other reading of this work is possible from Browne’s vantage point. Another male sensibility at work here may be Godwin’s ‘St. Leon’, cited elsewhere by Hemans. On ‘city of refuge’, see Hughes, pp. 112-13, and Nanora Sweet, ‘“A darkling plain”: Hemans, Byron, and The Sceptic; A Poem’, in The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue (1820), ed. by Nanora Sweet and Barbara Taylor, Romantic Circles, University of Maryland (Jan. 2004) (para. 35)

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drama of Counter-Reformation Spain, Remorse, a topic for comparison in itself.17 But Hemans traces her poem’s origins chiefly to Blanco White — now the Anglican Rev. J. M. Blanco White but once the Spanish priest José María Blanco y Crespo, scion of the Irish ‘Whites’ of Seville. Two generations prior, the Whites had left Waterford for Seville to trade in wool and fruit, particularly with England. Again alike, Hemans and Blanco were both born into international trading families and had consular forbears, Hemans’ a Tuscan consul in Liverpool, White’s the British vice-consul at Seville.18 With other Irish, the Whites formed ‘a small Irish colony, whose members preserved the language’. Working in the counting house, young José ‘learnt English so as to speak it with some fluency’ and copy correspondence accurately. Thus it was that, when the revolutionary Junta fell in 1810, José/Joseph/Blanco/White could escape from Spain by impersonating an Englishman—by cursing a border guard in ‘perfectly idiomatic’ English.19 (Once in England, Blanco found it painfully impossible ever to pass as English.) All his life, Blanco studied languages in pursuit of new cultural affiliations, among them Greek (as in his ‘Leucadio’ moniker), French (as a young novitiate reading Rousseau with his dissident circle), and German (as a late-life advanced Unitarian).20 The Blanco of Letters from Spain by ‘Don Leucadio Doblado’ and ‘The Alcazar of Seville’ was nonetheless an uncanny, nuanced, pitch-perfect writer of English prose. Letters reads with a worldly ease, Byronic in its structure of older-wiser narrator and younger pícaro, the letter-writing Don ‘white doubled’ (an expatriate Spaniard visiting Spain) and his Rousseaureading ‘Spanish clergyman’ younger self. These are, says ‘Doblado’ in the revised work’s Preface, ‘one and the same’—thus Don Doblado doubled again.21 Martin Murphy finds ‘the Alcazar’ an exemplar of ‘a new aesthetic’ that rescued Blanco from ‘the straightjacket of rationalism’ (for enlightenment and skepticism joined the Inquisition in keeping Blanco on the rack). This aesthetic was a ‘figurative’ and ‘coded emotionally heightened re17

18 19

20 21

See Saglia in ‘Spanish Stages: British Romantic Tragedy and the Theatrical Politics of Spain, 1808-1823’, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), 19-32 (pp. 21-24). Murphy, pp. 7-8. Thom, I, 5-6, 162-63. On the American side, Blanco’s Spanish maternal great-uncle was founder of Los Angeles. For a discussion on Blanco’s “passing” as English and his perceptions of England, see Joselyn M. Almeida, ‘Blanco White and the Making of AngloHispanic Romanticism’, European Romantic Review, 17 (2006), 437-56 (p. 444). Murphy, pp. 29; 188. Preface to the Second Edition, Letters from Spain, 2nd edn, rev. and corr. by the author, pp. iii-iv.

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presentation’ of truth, recovered in ‘folklore’ native to Europe in Moorish Spain.22 Hemans allows a fresh reading of Blanco White for his cultural and literary successes, and his concern for women’s lives and incredulous dismay at Spain’s Inquisitional enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy and sexual and racial ‘purity’. The fate of young women and men — like those in Hemans’ poem — marks his obsessive life writing. In Thom’s compendium Life, Blanco protests against allowing ‘a girl of sixteen to bind herself forever with vows’, as his own two sisters did to the detriment of health and life, and protests against the priestly celibacy ordered for young men whose fortunes are irretrievably cast (as his were) with the Church: all enforced by the milder inquisition of ‘auricular confession’. White uses the ironies of ‘Doblado’ to expose the surveillance of Spanish hidalgos and higher clergy for their ‘pure blood’, originally a system of property seizure from the Moors, later a regime of exclusion and hypocrisy among Spaniards.23 At the age of six, Blanco saw the fire readied for the last victim of the Inquisition in Seville (a woman supposed to have seduced her confessors).24 He intended a (never completed) history of the Inquisition, and evidence of that study appears in four notes to The Forest Sanctuary and its plot.25 Murphy’s ‘Published Works Relating to Blanco White’ does not list The Forest Sanctuary and very rarely a woman’s work, while Blanco’s association with influential male contemporaries is well known to biographers and critics, Spaniards and Spanish Americans like Andrés Bello and Alberto Lista and Britons like Southey, Newman, Bentham, and Coleridge. The latter’s play Osorio, later Remorse, occupies the same sixteenth-century moment as Hemans’ poem and is cited there as almost another ‘Doblado’.26 In Spain, Blanco White’s twentieth-century recuperators were exiled scholar Vincente Llorens and dissident novelist Juan Goytisolo, the latter editing and publicizing Blanco as a champion of sexual freedom and cultural heterodoxy. Goytisolo’s embrace of Blanco has drawn criticism of alter-egoism (another Doblado?) and cultural essentialism. With keen insight, Alison Ribeiro De Menezes and Angel Loureiro see both White and Goytisolo as ‘apostates’ who deconstructively ‘embrace a wandering destiny, their return home always 22 23

24 25 26

Murphy, pp. 127-28. On Spanish religious, see especially Letters, Letter III, pp. 52-118 (p. 71); on ‘distinction of blood’, Letter II, pp. 23-51. Murphy, p. 5. Thom, I, p. 149; II, p. 53; III, p. 197. Coleridge’s admiration of White’s English sonnet ‘Night and Death’ earned it anthologizing by Quiller-Couch. Murphy, p. 207.

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deferred’; later Loureiro finds them Foucauldian subjects ever ‘colonized’ by Catholic tyranny in ‘mind and body’.27 Sidestepping theoretical dilemmas, biographer Martin Murphy records Blanco’s activity widely in politics, religion, education, and literature; and critic Joselyn M. Almeida places welcome emphasis on Blanco’s production of text, linguistically transatlantic text, especially in his Atlanticist periodicals El Español and Variedades.28 Working through Hemans, I highlight Blanco’s ‘text’ as culturally intertextual and, in the same moment, ask recognition of the trauma experienced and anticipated in Blanco’s and Hemans’ works and lives and continued against both posthumously.29 Hemans awakens us to Blanco’s linguistic readiness from childhood as an English writer — a part of him forgotten, or repressed, by a Victorian establishment that, from Newman to Gladstone, was in thrall to the religious controversy and threatened by England’s Catholic colony offshore and its (American-allied) Unitarian intellectuals. Among English Victorians, Blanco’s fate was a prejudiced one, his name synonymous with religious apostasy and mental malady. In the memoirs of Archbishop Whately’s son, pleasant memories change to abuse: Blanco is judged ‘of unsound mind’ by three ‘medical men’ and the Unitarians despoiled of their prize convert in the same blow. J. B. Mozley’s retrospective refers to White’s early education and political activity but closes again with descriptions of instability and jabs at Unitarians. W. E. Gladstone repeats

27

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On alter-egoism or ‘self-reading’, a widespread theme in JBW criticism, see Michael Ugarte, Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), pp. 46-47. On Goytisolo’s essentialism about White, ever the ‘imposter’, see Alison Ribeiro De Menezes, ‘Purloined Letters: Juan Goytisolo, José María Blanco White, and the Cultural Construction of Marginal Identity’, in Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History, eds Eric Caldicott and Anne Fuschs (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 327-40 (p.335). On deferral, see especially Angel B. Loureiro in ‘Intertextual Lives: Blanco White and Juan Goytisolo’, in Intertextual Pursuits: Literary Mediations in Modern Spanish Narrative, ed. by Jeanne P. Brownlow and John W. Kronik (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996), pp. 42-56 (p. 54 on ‘apostates’); on ‘colonization’, see Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), pp. 42 and 46. Almeida well extends my own early interest in Blanco and Hemans as figures of international exchange and sites of conversion productive of new consciousness: ‘“Hitherto closed to British enterprise”: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World circa 1814’, European Romantic Review, 8 (1997), 139-47. I thank Professor Mark Burkholder of the University of Missouri-St. Louis for his historian’s eye on that work. For astute critiques of Hemans’ posthumous denigration, see Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford, 1989), pp. 233-41, and Barbara D. Taylor, ‘Felicia Hemans: The Making of a Professional Poet’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, Loughborough University, 1998), pp. 3-8.

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these views with a politician’s finesse, concluding patronizingly that not much is to be feared ‘from the posthumous influence of Mr. Blanco White’. When Edward Whately has Blanco ‘singularly lacking in ballast’, he does hint at the oceanic values to come in Hemans’ Blanconian poem.30 An epic romance with parallels to Wordsworth’s poetry of consciousness, in variant stanzas of the Spenserian form that Byron identified as traditionally equivocal and in the voice of a first-person male narrator (both rare in Hemans), The Forest Sanctuary has drawn a range of response to its narrator and plot, genre, and style. Marlon Ross found a lesson in woman’s affections for the poem’s exiled father, Julie Ellison a male subjectivity founded in female sacrifice. In a rare publication devoted to the poem, John Anderson focuses on its male subject who is immersed in a field of female voices and finds a dialogic epic presided over by sound (Echo) rather than sight (Narcissus). In his work on this and other poems by Hemans, Gary Kelly follows a feminization of masculine history into an equivocal formation of the modern liberal subject, while Diego Saglia works in a national framework where the protagonist figures ‘loss of ancestry and the fatherland.’ The construction of a male narrator/subject absorbs all here, whether as advances in the construction of gender (Ross, Anderson) or unattractive historical compromises for one or both genders (Ellison, Kelly, Saglia).31 Turning from narrative to discourse, Andrew Elfenbein identifies a style capitalizing on ‘normative femininity’, while Anne Hartman sees a philosophical skepticism traceable to Hume that impacts discourses of gender. Hartman cites Isobel Armstrong on The Forest Sanctuary as ‘Monumental Legend’ — a ‘sincerely fraudulent’ or skeptical form in the ‘double-voiced’ mode Armstrong pursues for nineteenth-century women’s poetry. For Armstrong herself, The Forest Sanctuary expresses ‘a dreamwork compound, as fears of Catholic emancipation are fused with an ambiguous response to economic depression and forced emigration’. It might fit Armstrong’s second women’s form ‘Oceanic Monody’ as well, given its ‘universe of flux’ and ocean imagery. Accordingly, Hartman identifies the poem’s drama as ‘the 30

31

Edward M. Whately, Personal and Family Glimpses of Remarkable People (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1889), p.116. J. B. Mozley, ‘Blanco White’, in Essays Historical and Theological, 2 vols (London: Rivingston, 1878), II, pp. 68-148. W. E. Gladstone, ‘Blanco White’, in Gleanings of Past Years, 1845-76 — Personal and Literary (London: Murray, 1879), pp. 1-64. Ross, pp. 290-95; Julie Ellison, ‘The Claim to Grief: History, Elegy, and the Feminine in Hemans’s “The Forest Sanctuary”’, unpub. essay, no date; Anderson, pp. 55-73; Gary Kelly, ‘Hemans and Mary Shelley in the 1820s’, Romanticism, 3 (1997), 198-208. My 1997 essay finds more neutral signs of modernity’s ‘free trade’ in Hemans and White. See Saglia, Poetic Castles, p. 178.

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impact of the external world upon the mind of the speaker’, where ‘objects continually permeate one another and permeate the mind of the exile’.32 Forms of fusion and flux inhabit this line of criticism of Hemans’ transatlantic uncanny. Structurally, The Forest Sanctuary and both its ‘Parts’ (of 93 and 76 stanzas respectively) are framed in scenes of a North American forest of variable light and sounding waters that are among the most equivocal sections of the poem. Their narration recalls Coleridge’s ‘conversation poems’, specifically ‘Frost at Midnight’, for the banished Spaniard’s interior monologue becomes an address to his son for whom better things are wished than visited his father. But the father’s weeping ‘on thy bright head, my boy’ (I.viii) renders consolation dubious. Framed within each part is one great episode, first an auto de fé, then a burial at sea. Each offers heightened trauma under Old World sanctions, with transition scenes of flight, conversion, arrest, arrival, and departure captured as ‘all my life’s farewells’ (II.lxxiv). As a book featuring its title poem, The Forest Sanctuary was published in 1825 by John Murray (appearing in 1826) and included a major series by Hemans, ‘Lays of Many Lands’ (21 poems), and ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ (7). Remaining a stable text, the poem was published again in Hemans’ lifetime, by Andrews Norton in an American selection of her work (1827), and by William Blackwood of Edinburgh who expanded the Murray edition with more lyrics (1829, 1835) including the famous ‘Casabianca’. Underlying publication is a variant manuscript as yet incompletely processed by Hemans’ editors (Kelly briefly describing, Wolfson extensively quoting); its differences recommend a full-scale study. The manuscript can be more pointed than the poem; during one of its tender father-son colloquies it broaches the subject of judicial action by sons against fathers.33 The manuscript also ends in a lyric, ‘The Treasures of the Deep’, which in the 32

33

Andrew Elfenbein, ‘Contesting Heterodoxy: Mrs Hemans vs. Lord Byron’ [1993], and Anne Hartman, ‘Hemans, Hume, and Scepticism’, appear in The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue (1820), ed. by Nanora Sweet and Barbara Taylor, Romantic Circles, University of Maryland (Jan. 2004) . Hartman considers The Forest Sanctuary in par. 20-26; see also Hartman’s ‘Debating Scepticism: A Poetics of Self-expression, 1815-1850’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2000), pp. 37-59 (pp. 42, 47 qtd here). Isobel Armstrong, ‘Misrepresentations: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry’, in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, ed. by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 3-32 (pp. 12-13, 15). Wolfson, p. 294. Citations will be by Part and stanza; or just stanza when Part is clear from context.

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book heads the later ‘Miscellaneous Poems’. As a coda to The Forest Sanctuary, this lyric resists closure while extending motifs of surface and depth and speaking to the defining event of Part Second, burial at sea. The poem’s lavish, echoic text works in counterpoint with notes from Hemans’ extensive reading and keeping of commonplace books. Textually, the work’s two Parts each bear two epigraphs; the poem as a whole has twenty-three notes. To read Blanco’s part in this poem — and Hemans’ achievement artistically in concert with him and the entire Anglo-Hispanic and Atlantic field summoned for the poem — is to read paratext interactively with the text and to advance the dialogic properties John Anderson has already noted. Blanco figures in six notes; and through them he becomes responsible for the poem’s Spanish Protestant persona, the auto de fé episode dominating Part I, and its déjà vu uncanniness. The poem’s further intertextualities form linked clusters: transatlantic material turning on a Hispanic or North American world (Coleridge, Lockhart, Percy, Campbell, Humboldt; Hodgson, Irving, Grant) and oceanic experience echoed by passages that can render continents themselves oceanic (Humboldt again, Wordsworth, the Book of Revelation, Hodgson). Its epigraphs differ in effect. They set out genre and plot, gendered contingency and tone. All four declare dramatic intentions (persona, voice). The epigraphs for Part First set out a heroic plot of temporal sacrifice for spiritual gain, enlisting sympathies with Hemans’ dissident Spaniard with lines from Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans (Joan is marshaled from home by ‘the spirit’s voice’) and Coleridge’s Schillerian Remorse, whose proscribed sixteenth-century Spanish Protestant seeks ‘liberty of faith’ on Spain’s ‘native’ soil. Part Second’s epigraphs enlist our sympathies with the Spaniard’s still-Catholic wife, reflecting the anguish of a woman who fears that a man she loves is forever lost to spiritual sanction (Margaret in Faust) or state power (the mother in John Wilson’s The Convict who halts the execution of her falsely accused son).34 These masculine and feminine sufferings make up the affective field of the poem. Striking and then sustaining this note in her paratext, Hemans once again — as she has in her high progresses, tales, plays, cycles, theological speculations — turns unerringly to historical trauma and confounds critics who seek in her a consolatory idyll.35 34

35

Wolfson, p. 292; citations to Notes will appear in text, with Wolfson’s numbering in parentheses. Even Gary Kelly in his astute introduction to this work finds it, if not an idyll, ‘an argument of historical and transhistorical consolation’. Kelly, Felicia Hemans, p. 43. The definitive study of Hemans and trauma is Michael Williamson’s ‘Impure Affections: Felicia Hemans’s

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Consolatory tones do feel available to this poem, given the quotation from William Wordsworth’s The Excursion in Note 2, with the child hearing the far-off sea in a shell: ‘Even such a shell the Universe itself | Is to the ear of Faith’. Yet Hemans’ ‘shell’ is not a Universe that likewise brings confirmation to the ‘ear of Faith’ but rather a Spaniard’s ‘breast’ that ‘moans’ for a ‘birthplace’ now alien (I.iv). Hemans’ poem sounds with a sea not affirming but estranging; and the displaced moans and glassy surfaces of Hemans’ seas find permutations throughout her text and paratext — furthering Anderson’s dialectic of Echo and Narcissus. Such displaced and ventriloquized sounds (shell? ear? breast? sea?) speak of losses that accompany an imperial vanguard escaping an Old-World settlement synonymous with Inquisition. This was Blanco White’s experience even in England, supposedly his refuge from Inquisition. He fled Catholic Spain for Protestant England, as his Catholic grandparents had fled an English Protestant ascendancy; he campaigned against a legitimization of Catholicism through Emancipation; then in an apostasy to his Oxford hosts, for Peel and Emancipation.36 The ‘voices of my home!’ that frame the poem and its Parts in a North American setting would be consoling but instead ‘they haunt me’ under alien skies that do not rest over the exile’s ‘dead’. Those lie under a ‘southern’ sun — but for ‘one gentle head’. For her, only the ‘echoes in my breast’; and the Spaniard denies that the ‘glassy water’ around him brings echoes of the ‘distant main’ under which she sleeps (i-iv). Meanwhile the legacy of Spain’s ‘bright land’ for the Spaniard’s son in the New World is ‘marks of torture and the chain’; ‘dark thoughts’. The poem’s pressure of negatively leading rhetorical questions begins here: it is as if the narrator is saying what part has the blight of man on man where ‘God alone | Speaks? […] Shall I not rejoice’ to claim here direct Protestant audition? And guide my son in its ways? (One thinks of Ferdinand White.) On whose head I have been weeping’. These and other waters cannot after all be contained, the ‘rolling waves’ that bear the exile, the ‘mighty rivers, ye that meet the main, | As deep meets deep’ (I.vivii.53, 59; ix.73, 77; x.84). The consolation? ‘’Tis well to die’ (I.x.87). And burial at sea comes closer as both land and lake in the forest wave with currents of air. For her undulations here, Hemans digs purposefully and deep: from a footnote in Adam Hodgson’s Letters from North America, she draws ‘cane, which forms a thick undergrowth in the forests for many hundred miles’ (n. 1), then adds a ‘sighing’ breath ‘through the feathery canes’

36

Elegiac Poetry and Contaminated Grief’, in Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 19-35. Murphy, pp. 148-150.

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(I.iii.23). A note from Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall twists the knife with ‘serpent-folds’ Laocoön-like around a patriarchal oak.37 Now present consciousness is broken through by ‘Spain’ and ‘suddenwakening pain!’, and Part First’s frame gives way to its great episode the auto de fé. The Spaniard recalls deserted fields and a ‘throng’ from city gates, humanity itself now an inundation, a ‘torrent’, ‘billows’ (I. xii-xiv). One recalls Hemans’ throngs in earlier ‘historic scenes’, scenes of republican awakening, but here people are instead ‘a frozen torrent’ as like the burying ocean they lead victims on to immolation.38 Already in denial, ‘they saw, and thought it well’ — as did the narrator. Here the figure of ‘glass’ returns, now the ‘glass’ through which ‘I gaz’d, I saw, | Dimly’ (xix-xx) of First Corinthians. This glazed surface both protects from trauma and foments it. It is both the result and the cause of ushering/deserting others/self to eternal suffering, as Blanco could recall from viewing auto de fé in his childhood and leaving his sisters to shortened lives in Spanish convents. It is even the Inquisitor’s guilt in Coleridge’s play, at best a valueless ‘remorse’. Then, recognition tears through the Spaniard’s trance like ‘thunder’: Alvar, who shares his name with Coleridge’s Spanish Protestant, is the narrator’s ‘heart’s first friend’ and fellow conquistador — and we are back in ‘the white Andes’ where his friend rallied him in battle (I. xxi-xxiv). With perverse remorse (for a friend’s apostasy? his execution?), the poem asks if Alvar should have died in Peru. No; here the wind will spread his ‘ashes’ and ‘spirit’ (xxv; as it will the young Corsican’s in Hemans’ ‘Casabianca’). Meanwhile, the Protestant God of Alvar, ‘Searcher of the Soul’, lasers in on any and all guilt, which in another perverse touch now includes Alvar’s very Protestant ‘crime’ of worshipping ‘thee’ (I. xxvi). And now Blanco White, borne in on by both Catholic and Protestant Gods, makes an unannounced appearance in Hemans’ poem. For Blanco White (unidentified by Hemans’ editors) is the author of the Quarterly Review review of ‘Quin’s Visit to Spain’ that generates Notes 4-7 and Hemans’ entire sixteenth-century scene of auto de fé.39 Quickly commending Quin, who treats of the fall of constitutionalism in 1823, 37

38

39

Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America, Written During a Tour in the United States and Canada, 2 vols (London: Hurst, Robinson, & Co., 1824), p. 242. Printed in Liverpool by one formerly in the ‘American trade’. See her Tales, and Historic Scenes, in Verse (London: Murray, 1819); her 1825 scene may gain effect from Keats’s emptied village and procession in the ‘cold pastoral’ of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Following Murphy, Saglia attributes the Quin review to Blanco; he does not follow it to The Forest Sanctuary: see Poetic Castles, pp. 316-17.

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White’s anonymous review turns to his own memories and views and his position that Spanish constitutionalism cannot govern as long as an Inquisition can be restored or invoked. Hemans’ poem does not extend to this point, but otherwise follows the matter of the review: Moorish defeat, a fetished ‘purity of blood’ enforced by Inquisition unto ‘posterity’, religious reformers (Protestants) prosecuted with the same hand as Moors and Jews. White details examples especially from the sixteenth century under Philip II (‘our Mary’s husband’, in an alarmist twist) but also his own memory in 1788 of having ‘seen the scaffold, supported on combustibles, where, a few hours after, a female perished at Seville’.40 Like Hemans’ Spaniard, Blanco here is an observer who will not see the denouement of an auto de fé but who models the displacement of vision into consciousness that makes up Hemans’ narration throughout. The poem’s notes from the review capture both history and ideology: Note 4 announces the review’s account ‘of the Spanish Protestants, and the heroic devotion with which they met the spirit of persecution in the sixteenth century’; Note 5 recounts the trials and deaths of a dissident ‘priest Gonzalez’ and his proselyte sisters imprisoned, tortured by the Inquisition, and executed in 1559; Note 6 paraphrases White on the ‘indelible stain’ of such racial or ideological condemnation to posterity; and Note 7 speaks of the removal of punishment dictated by auto de fé ‘without the town’ and ‘till midnight’, ensuring a more lurid scene and also allying this punishment with midnight motifs in the German Secret Tribunal of her other poem. Meanwhile, Hemans’ narrator stands frozen by his own internalized inquisition as his friends go to their deaths. The scene’s women take center stage — as Alvar’s wife will in Part Second — in each case with the help of Blanco’s review. There the sisters of Gonzales are impressive but anonymous, but Hemans draws a name for the most devoted of the two from elsewhere in the review’s accounts of auto de fé: ‘Theresa’ (also Spain’s iconic saint), who marches unperturbed to her demonstration of ‘faith’ (I. lii); Hemans uses another name from the review for the Spaniard’s wife, ‘Leonor’.41 The auto de fé’s sanctions move inexorably forward, when the lover of the second sister, Inez, arrives and tries to rescue her (I. lv-lxv). Her struggle is immediately deathly — and expressed oceanically as a ‘turning billow’ (I. lvii). Alvar’s voice in gentle commendation of Inez now awakens the Spaniard, who reaches for him — but his gesture is lost in the crush —

40

41

Anon., Rev. A Visit to Spain, by Michael J. Quin, Quarterly Review 29 (April & July 1823), 240-75 (pp. 243, 252, 256-57). Hereafter ‘Quin’. Quin, pp. 253, 257.

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and the Spaniard flees his friends’ fiery death for conversion and imprisonment of his own. It is a Catholic ‘mighty minster’ that offers the Spaniard sanctuary, as he flees with his friends’ screams in his ears (I. lxxvi-lxxvii). Hemans works this ‘refuge’ for the kind of ‘coded’ truth Murphy identifies as Blanco’s new aesthetic. First, Note 8 invokes the work by Blanco favored in her letters, Letters from Spain: ‘For one of the most powerful and impressive pictures perhaps ever drawn, of a young mind struggling against habit and superstition in its first aspirations after truth, see the admirable Letters from Spain by Don Leucadio Doblado’.42 Indeed, ‘[S]how me truth!’ implores her Spaniard. Soon a window above, cold with silvery moonlight, will bring the sacrificed ‘Son of God’ as savior. But now, for the traumatized Spaniard, the floor of the church teems with those who died under superstition’s regime, the air with ‘the funereal breath | Of incense’ (lxxviii). To develop her imagery of church floor, in Note 9 to this passage Hemans calls on yet another set of fictive ‘Letters’, John Gibson Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819; Letter LXVII). Contrasting Gothic cathedrals in Presbyterian and Catholic and especially Spanish form, Lockhart lingers over their glassy, pool-like floors. Packed with ‘the forms of the departed’, this floor encompasses the aesthetic Hemans has been developing, of surface/depth, forgetting/memory, Protestant/Catholic, trauma/déjà vu: The whole immeasureable space below, — nave, transept, and sounding aisles — are left glowing in their bare marble beneath these floods of enriched and golden light — no lines of heavy pews are allowed to break the surface — it seems as if none could have any permanent place there except those who sleep beneath. [Hemans begins her passage at this point.] You walk from end to end over a floor of tomb-stones, inlaid in brass with the forms of the departed — mitres and crosiers, and spears, and shields, and helmets, all mingled together — all worn into glass-like smoothness by the feet and the knees of long departed worshippers.43

No extra-human sea, this ‘glassy’ surface is brought to a sheen by worshipper traffic, and its hard-won opacity is inseparable from the armatures and memorials of war and peace just beneath. One sees a sealed surface (Narcissus-like), but in focusing anew, one sees a scene of Old World instrument and carnage. Now, in the text, the feet of the moonlit Christ step out with a ‘gliding tread’ over the ‘billows’ of Hemans’ version of Mark 6.45-54, 42 43

Wolfson, p. 296, n. 35. Hemans does not identify Lockhart as author. I quote from Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, ed. by William Ruddick (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1977), p. 163. See also Wolfson, p. 296.

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‘as o’er glass’ (lxxxii). Immediately Hemans couches hope against drowning in the glassy sea in negative questions: ‘But didst Thou not, the deep sea brightly treading, | Lift from despair that struggler with the wave?’ (lxxxviii). Part Second’s burial at sea will, unfortunately, reward skepticism that a glassy surface compounded of belief and doubt can hold and a savior walk. Part First races to a close in three stanzas, with return home to wife and a son who now in the North American frame is ‘free!’ (but the son flashes him a ‘lightning laughter’ glossed in Hemans’ Note 10 as that of Petrarch’s Laura, already ‘dust’ in his Rime 292).44 As for the Spaniard, he returns to the déjà vu of Old World in New. The Catholic ‘minster’ that gave him moments of sanctuary for Protestant conversion held annealed the ‘dead’ whose memorial presence he would yearn for in the New World (I. iii) — as he will yearn for his unconverted wife, held under a ‘glassy sea’ of her own. The poem’s last stanza avers that, in a forest sanctuary with its ‘high arcades, | As though a pillar’d cloister’s’, ‘the dead | Sleep not beneath’ and that, unaffected by such Old-World pieties, his young son might worship in a nature there unadorned with Gothicism. Yet the poem adds a note countering this stance. Note 11 returns to the Letters from North America by Hemans’ fellow Liverpudlian Adam Hodgson, this time to its passage from Daniel Webster’s oration on the Pilgrim Fathers. Hemans elects lines that enchurch the Pilgrims in forest boughs — and that develop her New World ‘forest sanctuary’ while undermining it with déjà vu, with the unreformed Old in the New: Sometimes their discourse was held in the deep shades of moss-grown forests, whose gloom and interlaced boughs first suggested that Gothic architecture, beneath whose pointed arches, where they had studied and prayed, the parti-coloured windows shed a tinged light; scenes, which the gleams of sunshine, penetrating the deep foliage, and flickering on the variegated turf below, might have recalled to their memory.45

The New World’s ‘forest sanctuary’ cannot supplant the cathedrals of the Old; they are part of its psychic architecture. The poem challenges us again to sort consolation from grief, original from copy, tenor from vehicle, Old World from New, depth from surface. Part Second begins with fresh scenes of the New World, but these feature the ‘forest aisles’ of Note 11’s church imagery and a strengthened inland ‘torrent water’ that would overcome the Spaniard with memories of his 44

45

Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 470. Hodgson, pp. 304-05.

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wife’s burial at sea.46 He contends with Protestantism’s blinding truth and his own ‘burning word’ (II.iv.38; II.v) even now, as he recalls scenes of imprisonment and torture elided in Part First; for he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured when his conversion came to light and before returning home. Part Second by turns divulges and suppresses this material (II. iv-xvi). Trapped in a ‘grave-like cell’ in Spain, the Spaniard resisted giving information. Now in America, in stanzas of conflicted consciousness, he resists spelling out for his son’s tender ears ‘what befell in that drear prison-house’ (II. v, xiv) for instance, when he lost control, exposing ‘old long-buried things, | Which a storm’s working to the surface brings’ (II. viii. 69) as the poem continues to work with surfaces of waters. Under extreme pressure in the dungeon, he experienced a hallucination: significantly unheimlich, it was deceptively an unfolding scene of homecoming (II. ix-xiii). Hemans’ Note 13 has mentioned a ‘circular rainbow’ in the Andes. Here, under pressure of ‘fever’d longings’, his walls give way to a circle of ‘hills’; then, ‘from the darkness of the walls they brought | A lov’d scene round me, visibly around’. Moorish Spain is backlit by ‘a Heaven all glowing, | Like seas of glass and fire’, with the glassy sea by now the poem’s trademark but here apocalyptic, from Revelation 15.2 (II. xi. 94-95).47 Now, before the Spaniard’s ‘bright dream vanish’d’, Hemans offers her final Note involving Blanco. Advancing to a study of the psychology of déjà vu, virtuality, and other experiences leading dually to skepticism and faith, this Note invokes Blanco’s magical ‘The Alcazar of Seville’, and the ‘Tale of the Green Taper’. Note 14 first cites Samuel Hibbert’s Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (1824) on how ‘the mind, when strongly excited,’ can ‘renovate past impressions, and embody them into visible imagery’. Hibbert offers the experience of Dr. John Ferriar, who found that ‘interesting’ scenes of the day would appear before him involuntarily in a darkened room, ‘with a brilliancy equal’ to their originals.48 Hemans turns to ‘Doblado’s’ ‘Alcazar’, where memories of Seville render the present a ‘delusion’ and the past a sensory ‘reality that almost make me shudder’. Beyond Hemans’ quotation, Blanco

46

47

48

Part Second, stanza I also evokes Byron, an abiding male counterpoint in Hemans’ work: see the opening of Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; subsequent stanzas may recall that poet’s The Prisoner of Chillon. The poem’s reiterated glassy sea echoes another of her literary interlocutors, Reginald Heber, whose famed hymn ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’ features the phrase. On these figures and their texts, see Wolfson, p. 318, n. 11, and Hartman, pp. 40-41, 50-52.

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speaks of ‘exile’ and its ‘unhealed wounds’ that ‘bleed anew’.49 His ‘Alcazar’ moves by incidental displacements from memory to tale, from a solitary idyll in Seville’s royal gardens, to troops of shrubbery people and gushing hydraulics, to the garrulous companionship of an antiquarian who gossips in real time about the fourteenth-century Peter the Cruel, to the Morisco ‘Tale of the Green Taper’. Echoing Part Second’s earlier ‘grave-like cell’, ‘Alcazar’ steps below ground into fatal, airless vaults, as the story shifts from Christian rule to a Moorish space lost to his female Moriscos but reclaimed below the level of consciousness. Released unaccountably (in the arbitrary way of this sequence), the Spaniard reaches home, only to plan his family’s flight. This will prove fatal to his wife Leonor on their Atlantic crossing; like White’s Moorish heroines perishing at the vault, she signals the cost of exile and emigration and adds the prophetic power of a burial in a sea so fathomless that, in Note 19 from Revelation, ‘There was no more sea’ (II. lx). Hemans lengthens this sequence with her protagonist’s denials of Leonor’s evident mortal decline; his denials, like the suppression of the Moors, ensure that that each will return as the repressed via déjà vu and indeed precede him in the New World. Imploring the ‘most holy’ mother in one song, Leonor sings from a Moorish ballad on the blood-stained rivers of Spain in another. Here Hemans draws on Pérez de Hita’s Guerras Civiles, read for her 1819 ‘The Abencerrage’, while referring English readers to Thomas Percy’s collection. Burial at sea can only disseminate her death. Stopping briefly in South America, father and son move on to find their ‘bower of refuge’ in the woods of the North (II. lxii. 650); but this father’s sorrow and remorse have preceded them there (tears, waters), the ocean informing the land. Continental ‘cataracts’ fill the glades, ‘With hollow surge-like sounds, as from the bed | Of the blue mournful seas, that keep the dead’ (II. lxxiii. 668-69). The Spaniard’s sadness is palpable — ‘and I am here, | Living again through all my life’s farewells’ — up to the final alexandrine, which allows ‘His presence,’ sought ‘here’ by the Protestant (II. xxiv. 678-79). In these last stages, the poem calls on a new source of male subjectivity in Alexander von Humboldt that registers the uncanny presence of Old World in New and the oceanic in the continental. Hemans’ annotations to Part First began and ended with Adam Hodgson on North America’s fluid fields and forests like cathedrals; Part Second likewise turns early and late to texts, from Anne Grant, Thomas Campbell, and Humboldt, that feature currents of air 49

‘The Alcazar of Seville, and the Tale of the Green Taper’, by the Author of Doblado’s Letters, in Forget Me Not for 1825, pp. 31-54 (pp. 32-33). See Murphy, p. 248.

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and water and the appearance of the Old in the New. Part Second’s texts extend more fully to the South Atlantic and South America, with Humboldt traveling to seas and lands that Hemans and Blanco White strongly imagined but never saw. Hemans again unerringly finds motifs that confound notions of hemispheres and continents (North/South, New/Old, land/water) and disturb the ‘glassy’ surface of her work. Literally, these texts demonstrate the swerve of land to water as in Part First — but now currents of air motivate the instabilities Hemans applies to continents. These annotations should trouble any alignment of her epic of consciousness with Wordsworthian consolation rather than Blanconian inquisition. The water that disturbs continents in Part First modulates here into currents of air that can be even more unnerving — the more so when they go completely still. Incising passages with uncanny ability, Hemans offers from Grant a waterfall along the Hudson whose variegated sounds serve as barometer to winds; from Campbell ‘pendulous’ bridges over ‘deep chasms in the Andes’ where ‘fibres of equinoctial plants’ hang with ‘tremulous motion’; from Humboldt ‘subterraneous sounds’ or ‘mysterious music’ from the rocks along the Orinoco; again from Humboldt, ‘the extreme stillness of the air in the equatorial regions of the new continent, and particularly along the thickly wooded shores of the Oronoco’.50 Hemans’ Spaniard father and son pass through Spanish America quickly, the father troubled by these effects (I. lxviii-lxx). In the central episode of Part Second, burial at sea, two texts from Humboldt annotate the South Atlantic setting of Leonor’s death. By virtue of the Southern Cross, the very firmament over the seas of the southern/western hemisphere is already imagined, or colonized, by denizens of the northern/ eastern. In Note 16, sailors from Spain and Portugal welcome the Southern Cross as exactly ‘the sign of the faith planted by their ancestors in the deserts of the new world’. More subtly, in his Personal Narrative of Travels in the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent Humboldt speaks of the estrangement of new firmament sweeping into his ken — but of youthful ‘reveries’ about the Southern Cross and a ‘painful’ ‘fear’ that he would never behold ‘those beautiful constellations, which border the southern pole.’ Mediated by a passage from Dante, these reveries render the ‘Southern’ constellation another instance of déjà vu: what is already an interpretation — a constellation — renders Southern reality (as it were) a copy of Northern reverie. The Cross is also a timepiece; and ritualized matters of night and 50

On these Notes 12, 20, 21, 22, and 23, see Wolfson, pp. 317 and 321-22; in her numbering, they are Part Second notes 3, 41, 43, 44.

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morning come to the fore once Leonor dies at night (as day and midnight do for victims of an auto de fé). Aiming to contain the ocean’s power, Hemans selects a shipboard anecdote from Humboldt in which, after a nighttime death, a priest delays burial at sea until morning.51 As a romantic epic of consciousness, The Forest Sanctuary does much that cannot be covered here. As a work of Anglo-Spanish consciousness, with the help of Blanco White, it captures an England and Spain swerving toward each other, politically, economically, and culturally; a Catholicism compelling escape from Spain but freshly revenant in England; an England and Spain reversing roles and resonating in déjà vu, empire over empire; Spaniards in England writing letters from Spain to England; and much more. In the process, the eastern Atlantic littoral of Blanco White’s displacements (Cadiz and London, Liverpool and Seville, Dublin and Madrid) gets remapped as the full Atlantic, Boston to Buenos Aires and beyond: still observing Anglo-Spanish protocols and still in struggle between the Spain of the liberales and the Spain of Gothic Inquisition.

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51

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799-1804, trans. by Helen Maria Williams, 7 vols, 1814 (New York: AMS, 1966), II, 19-22.

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Cohen, Margaret, and Carolyn Dever, eds., ‘The (Dis)locations of Romantic Nationalism: Shelley, Staël, and the Home-Schooling of Monsters’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) De Menezes, Alison Ribeiro, ‘Purloined Letters: Juan Goytisolo, José María Blanco White, and the Cultural Construction of Marginal Identity’, in Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History, eds. Eric Caldicott and Anne Fuschs (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003) Doblado Leucadio, Don, [Blanco White], Preface to the First Edition, Letters from Spain, 2nd edn, rev. and corr. by the author (London: Colburn, 1825) ——, ‘The Alcazar of Seville, and the Tale of the Green Taper’, in Forget Me Not for 1825, 31-54 (pp. 32-33). Elfenbein, Andrew, ‘Contesting Heterodoxy: Mrs Hemans vs. Lord Byron’ [1993] in The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue (1820), ed. by Nanora Sweet and Barbara Taylor, Romantic Circles, University of Maryland (Jan. 2004) Ellison, Julie, ‘The Claim to Grief: History, Elegy, and the Feminine in Hemans’s “The Forest Sanctuary”’, unpub. essay, no date Gladstone, W. E., ‘Blanco White’, Gleanings of Past Years, 1845-76 — Personal and Literary (London: Murray, 1879) Hall, Basil, Extracts from a Journal, written on the coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1825) Hartman, Anne, ‘Hemans, Hume, and Scepticism’ in The Sceptic: A HemansByron Dialogue (1820), ed. by Nanora Sweet and Barbara Taylor, Romantic Circles, University of Maryland (Jan. 2004) ——, ‘Debating Scepticism: A Poetics of Self-expression, 1815-1850’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2000) Hay, Daisy, ‘Liberals, Liberales, and The Liberal’, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), 307-320. Hemans, Felicia, Tales, and Historic Scenes, in Verse (London: Murray, 1819) Hodgson, Adam, Letters from North America, Written During a Tour in the United States and Canada, 2 vols (London: Hurst, Robinson, & Co., 1824) Humboldt, Alexander von, and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799-1804, trans. by Helen Maria Williams, 7 vols, 1814 (New York: AMS, 1966) Kelly, Gary, ed., Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002) ——, ‘Hemans and Mary Shelley in the 1820s’, Romanticism, 3 (1997), 198-208.

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‘A Memoir by Her Sister [Harriett Hughes]’, The Works of Mrs. Hemans, 7 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1839) Lawrence, Rose, ‘Recollections of Mrs. Hemans’, in The Last Autumn at a Favourite Residence (Liverpool: Robinson; London: Murray, 1836) Lockhart, John Gibson, Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, ed. by William Ruddick (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1977) Loureiro, Angel B., ‘Intertextual Lives: Blanco White and Juan Goytisolo’, in Intertextual Pursuits: Literary Mediations in Modern Spanish Narrative, ed. by Jeanne P. Brownlow and John W. Kronik (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996) ——, The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000) Mozley, J. B., ‘Blanco White’, in Essays Historical and Theological, 2 vols (London: Rivingston, 1878) McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995) Murphy, Martin, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) Ross, Marlon B., The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford, 1989) Saglia, Diego, ‘Hispanism in The New Monthly Magazine, 1821-1825’, Notes and Queries, 49.1 (2002), 49-55. ——, ‘“O My Mother Spain”: The Peninsular War, Family Matters, and the Practice of Romantic Nation-Writing’, ELH, 35 (1998), 363-393. ——, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) ——, ‘Spanish Stages: British Romantic Tragedy and the Theatrical Politics of Spain, 1808-1823’, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), 19-32. Sweet, Nanora, ‘The New Monthly Magazine and the Liberalism of the 1820s’, Prose Studies, 25 (2002), 147-62; rpt. in Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, ed. by Kim Wheatley (London: Frank Cass, 2003) ——, and Julie Melnyk, eds., Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) ——, ‘Felicia Hemans’ “A Tale of the Secret Tribunal”: Gothic Empire in the Age of Jeremy Bentham and Walter Scott’, European Journal of English Studies, 6.2 (2002), 159-171. ——, ‘“A darkling plain”: Hemans, Byron, and The Sceptic; A Poem’, in The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue (1820), ed. by Nanora Sweet and

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Barbara Taylor, Romantic Circles, University of Maryland (Jan. 2004) ——, ‘“Hitherto closed to British enterprise”: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World circa 1814’, European Romantic Review, 8 (1997), 139-47. Taylor, Barbara D., ‘Felicia Hemans: The Making of a Professional Poet’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, Loughborough University, 1998) Thom, John Hamilton, ed., The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, 3 vols (London: Chapman, 1845) Ugarte, Michael, Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982) Whately, Edward M., Personal and Family Glimpses of Remarkable People (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1889) Wolfson, Susan J., ed., Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Rebecca Cole Heinowitz

The Spanish American Bubble and Britain’s Crisis of Informal Empire, 1822–1826 During the first half of the 1820s, Britain experienced a veritable craze for speculation in the newly independent states of Spanish America. Then, in December of 1825, the bubble burst, to the ruin of thousands of banks, companies, and individual investors. The purpose of this essay is to examine the conflicting ways in which British literature, periodicals, and popular entertainments fomented, critiqued, and ultimately repudiated the investment mania. From 18221825, an entire cultural industry was carved out to exploit Britain’s infatuation with Spanish America. James Robinson Planché’s musical drama Cortez, or The Conquest of Mexico (1823) delighted audiences at Covent Garden, William Bullock’s Mexican Exhibition (1824-25) offered spectators tantalizing specimens of everything from contemporary Mexico’s gold and silver to its ancient Aztec relics, and entrepreneurs flooded the press with Spanish American stock and bond prospectuses. Against a prospect of such dazzling spectacles, Robert Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay and Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary (both 1825) stand out for their striking lack of exoticism, their avoidance of the subject of commerce, and their overarching morbidity. By placing these poems in the historical context of the boom and cataclysmic bust of the British economy, I argue that their absence of natural and cultural description and their association of Spanish America with fatality metaphorize the dangerously little that investors knew and the destruction that would soon result from their ignorance.

Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as ‘South American mad’.1 Indeed, from the loss of Britain’s North American colonies in 1776 to the first Spanish American debt crisis and the ensuing London stock market crash of 1825, a deep fascination with Spanish America pervaded all aspects of British society. As Spain’s hold on its colonies weakened under the weight of domestic pressures and ultramarine revolts, British merchants, miners, scientists, and traders rushed to exploit the mineral wealth and raw materials of Spanish America. Thousands of British soldiers enlisted to aid the colonial independence movements. Travelers flooded the British press with vivid accounts of everything from the famed silver mines of Potosí to the medicinal ‘Jesuits’ Bark’ of Peru, the social customs of Chile, the fatal earthquakes of Caracas, and the cultivation of logwood on the Mosquito Coast. The figure of Spanish America displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, cabinets of curiosity, political tracts, news reportage, reviews,

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Robert Southey, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. by Charles Cuthbert Southey (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), p. 202.

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stock market quotations, and even in the fashionable ladies’ magazines that announced the arrival in London of the ‘Bolivar hat.’ Creole patriots gathered in England to solicit aid for their revolutions, and ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain’s former colonies. At their core, these debates centered on the political, financial, and ethical advantages of informal, as opposed to formal, empire. Despite various failed attempts to wrest from Spain strategic American territories, Britain’s most enduring policy with regard to the region was based on strategies of investment and commerce. By contrast with the cruelty and greed attributed to the Spanish conquerors in popular Black Legend rhetoric, Britain’s selfimage was that of a bringer of peaceful improvement to America, ‘an oceanic empire of trade and settlement, not an empire of conquest’.2 In 1807, Secretary for War and the Colonies Lord Castlereagh rejected ‘any prospect of territorial acquisition, any dream of exclusive British political influence, or any intention to intervene […] in the political condition of the Spanish Colonies’.3 And when Castlereagh’s successor George Canning took office in 1822, he held firm to Castlereagh’s policy of acting as ‘auxiliaries and protectors’, rather than as conquerors in Spanish America.4 To be sure, it would be disingenuous to overlook the proprietary nature of these statements (in 1824, for example, on the eve of Britain’s formal recognition of the independent Spanish American states, Canning memorably remarked, ‘Spanish America is free, and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English’).5 Nevertheless, however interested Britain was in the possession of Spanish America, the discourse applied to these interests was predominantly that of liberation and enlightenment. In large part, literary Britain supported ministerial attitudes toward informal empire. Robertson’s History of America, which appeared in 1777, offered readers an admixture of classical economic critiques of monopoly trade, condemnation of the Spanish conquest, and a vision of contemporary Spanish America as destined for commercial liberty. In the following decades, works such as Helen Maria Williams’s Peru (1784), John Thelwall’s The Incas; or, 2

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Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 4. D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 312. Qtd. in H. S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 48. Qtd. in William W. Kaufmann, British Policy and the Independence of Latin America, 18041828 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 178.

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The Peruvian Virgin (1792), Thomas Morton’s Columbus; or, a World Discovered (1792), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799), and Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805) built on these principles and added to them an identification between Britons and indigenous Spanish Americans predicated on shared national characteristics such as sincerity, sensibility, and nobility of spirit. While such identificatory gestures served to bolster the call for Spanish American independence, they also functioned as a strategy of what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘anti-conquest’, namely to portray Britain’s economic penetration of the Spanish colonies as the fortuitous unification of two effectively similar cultures and to suggest at once Britain’s entitlement to predominance in the region and its innocence of any imperialist designs.6 Writings by Spanish American patriots in London and their British advocates supported this identification. In his Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains (1799) Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán solicited British aid for the revolutions against Spain by depicting Spanish America’s patriots as lovers of British constitutional monarchy and partisans of aristocratic reform. Francisco de Miranda, Andrés Bello, Simón Bolívar, William Burke, James Mill, and William Walton underscored the similarities between creole and British patriotism and, no less important, the compatibility of their financial and commercial objectives.

Spectacular Projections If during the peace with Spain, the British ministry was slow to admit de jure its de facto recognition of the new Spanish American republics, the British financial community had no such scruples. During the first half of the 1820s, Britain experienced a veritable mania for speculation in the newly independent states of Spanish America. An astonished Princess Lieven, wife of the Russian Ambassador in London, exclaimed: ‘You cannot imagine how mad everyone here has gone over the companies in South America.7 Everybody is buying shares. Everybody, from the lady to the footman, is

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Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. Pratt defines ‘anti-conquest’ as ‘the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony’. Contemporary nineteenth-century discourse frequently included Mexico and Central America in the portmanteau term ‘South America.’

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risking pin-money or wages in these enterprises’.8 This was no exaggeration — the Romantic era’s love affair with Spanish America seemed to have reached its zenith. In only three years, the new Spanish American governments floated approximately £20 million in bonds while British capitalization of Spanish American mining companies reached over £30 million.9 As Giorgio Fodor notes, ‘[f]or centuries the silver of Mexico and Peru had inflamed [the] European imagination; now these riches seemed open to British enterprise and capital’.10 The reading public was whipped up to a fever pitch by contemporary periodicals’ reports of easy and spectacular profits.11 Encouraging articles followed the floating of every loan. Information on the potential risks to investors was slim. Foreign works on Spanish America such as those of the Abbé de Pradt and Alexander von Humboldt were translated, republished, and avidly discussed in prominent periodicals such as The Annual Register and The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews. British newspapers such as The Times, The Morning Chronicle, and The Courier carefully followed the Spanish American independence movements, including in their pages details of each military victory, character descriptions of the revolutionary leaders, projections about the commercial benefits to come, and — what was new for British readers — regular stock and bond quotes.12 8

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The Private Letters of Princess Lieven to Prince Metternich 1820-1826, ed. by Peter Quennell (London: John Murray, 1948), p. 282. Although certainly some of this investment can be attributed to liberal enthusiasm for the cause of the Spanish American revolutions, most speculators had more mercenary motives. As Calvin Jones observes, ‘[m]ost of the English purchasers had not bought these bonds issued by the South American republics because of any desire to establish or protect their independence, nor on account of any sympathy for these states. Bonds or stocks issued by any country or company were purchased without any question being asked concerning their political ambitions or affiliations’. Calvin Jones, ‘Spanish-America in Selected British Periodicals, 1800-1830’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky, 1966), pp. 238, 240. Giorgio Fodor, ‘The Boom that Never Was? Latin American Loans in London 1822-1825’, Discussion Paper No. 5 (Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento, Dipartimento di Economia, 2002), p. 22. In addition to coverage in the contemporary press, the 1820s saw the publication of numerous essays and books on mining in Mexico. For a useful overview, see Robert W. Randall, Real del Monte: A British Mining Venture in Mexico (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1972). Whig periodicals such as The Morning Chronicle and The London Magazine generally supported the Spanish American revolutions from the belief that independence would increase British trade in the region. By contrast, Tory periodicals such as Blackwood’s and The New Times opined that the revolutionary wars hurt Britain’s existing trade and predicted that independence would destroy British prospects of stable and ongoing trade with Spanish

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In 1822, the first Spanish American bond prospectus was advertised in the press. Purchasers were assured that Colombia’s natural resources were ‘unbounded’ and that the region’s mines would issue enormous revenue ‘when they are in full work which it is expected they will shortly be’.13 Soon after the floating of the Colombian loan, loans to Chile, Peru, Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Central America, as well as stock in various Spanish American mining ventures, were advertised according to the same model of sanguine economic projections. The Morning Chronicle crowed that Mexico ‘produces everything necessary to the comforts and luxuries of man’.14 The Rio Plata Mining Association claimed that grains of gold ‘appear in sight when the rain washes away the dust which covers the surface.’ A woman, on stepping out of her hut after a rain, ‘found a piece of gold weighing twenty ounces’, an occurrence found ‘so frequently in the rainy season that it would require much time to detail them’.15 Loans to Mexico and the Rio Plata Mining Association were fully subscribed within days of their announcement. As The Morning Chronicle succinctly informed its readers, ‘there is no better way to dispose of surplus money than by investing in South America’.16 In December of 1824, Foreign Secretary Canning and Prime Minister Lord Liverpool announced Britain’s diplomatic recognition of Mexico, Colombia, and Buenos Aires. Two months later, word reached Britain that Simón Bolívar had defeated the last of the royalist troops in Peru. Amidst such happy news, stock and bond prices reached an all-time peak. During the years of the speculation boom, an entire cultural niche was carved out to support the Spanish American craze. The acclaimed improvisatore Signor Pestrucci regaled high society with spontaneously composed verses lauding Bolívar.17 Melodramatic extravaganzas such The Vision of the Sun; or the Orphan of Peru played at Covent Garden, dazzling audiences with their ‘palm-tree grove[s]’, ‘spicy incense’, ‘Cougars’, ‘ripe Pine-apple[s]’, and ‘glittering arms’.18 But while such performances appealed

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America by unleashing social chaos. As early as 1822, however, even some liberal periodicals aired concerns about speculation in Spanish American markets. See The London Magazine, Apr. 1822, p. 59, and Sept. 1822, pp. 34-35. Qtd. in Frank Griffith Dawson, The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and the 1822-25 Loan Bubble (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 29. The Morning Chronicle, 4 December 1823, p. 2. Qtd. in Francis Bond Head, Reports Relating to the Failure of the Rio Plata Mining Association (London: 1827), p. 143. The Morning Chronicle, 29 October 1823, p. 2. The Courier, 18 June 1825, p. 4 The Vision of the Sun; or, The Orphan of Peru, 1823 (Larpent MS 2343), I, pp. i, 19, 20, 3, 6. Other plays on Spanish American themes performed at Covent Garden during the

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to political sympathies and the public hunger for exotic novelty, the most prominent aspect of Britain’s Spanish American industry during these years was its consistent concern with investment. Rudolf Ackermann, London’s fashionable entrepreneur, engraver, and publisher, designed opulent bond certificates for the Colombian loan, each ‘surmounted by the Colombian eagle and coat of arms, with scantily-clad male and female allegorical figures representing the Orinoco and Magdalena rivers’.19 In November of 1823, James Robinson Planché’s popular musical drama Cortez, or The Conquest of Mexico delighted audiences, not with glittering calabashes and enchanted halls of porphyry, but rather by explicitly dramatizing the quest for wealth in the New World. Several days later, as if by design, the press released news that the first Mexican loan, in the amount of £5 million, would soon be available for subscription. At the summit of these cultural phenomena was William Bullock’s Mexican Exhibit at the Egyptian Hall in London, where audiences could see — all for the price of one shilling — ‘colossal and enormous idols, the great calendar and sacrificial stones, temples, pyramids’, ‘pure ores of gold and silver’, the ‘Maguey’ (or ‘tree of wonders’), ‘the Magnificent Alligator Pear or Avocata’, ‘the Flamingo’, and even a real ‘native Mexican Indian, Jose Cayetano Ponce de Leon’.20 Moreover, Bullock presented these enticing commodities as at the disposal of Britain, celebrating ‘the reciprocal advantages’ attending ‘an intercourse of the most liberal and extended nature between the Mexican and British nations’, and projecting that the ‘ardour and enterprise of the British merchant’ would soon redound ‘to the happiness of both nations’.21 As Bullock well understood, in the stock market, on the stage, and in the exhibition hall, Spanish America sold.22

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speculation boom include Augusta; or, The Blind Girl, The Magic Hall of Oultanpac, and The Royal Palace of Peru. Dawson, p. 29 William Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue of the exhibition, entitled Ancient and Modern Mexico; containing a panoramic view of the present city, specimens of the natural history of New Spain…at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (London: 1824), Title Page, pp. 9, 6, 14, 11, 8. Descriptive Catalogue, pp. iii, iv. For an excellent description and analysis of Bullock’s Mexican Exhibit, see Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 1-34.

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The Bubble Bursts Attention to Spanish America was not entirely the province of popular spectacle during these years, as is shown by the 1825 publication of Felicia Hemans’ American epic The Forest Sanctuary and Robert Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay. Hemans’ poem is narrated by a Spanish conquistador who, upon returning to Spain, converts to Protestantism, then flees to America seeking asylum from the Inquisition. The poem consists of his memories and reflections on Spain as he travels, first through South America, and then to North America in search of religious freedom. Southey’s poem, for its part, follows the wanderings of a Guaraní family, the last of their tribe to survive the Paraguayan colonial wars of 1750-56. The family encounters a benevolent Jesuit and removes to his reduction, where they die of smallpox, that infamous colonial disease. Southey’s narrative was faithfully based on Martin Dobrizhoffer’s recently translated Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay (1821), a work Southey himself very favorably reviewed for The Quarterly.23 Yet while both poems bear the telltale marks of interest in Spanish America, they stand out, not for any allusions to investment, commerce, or indigenous productions, but rather for their complete avoidance of Britain’s financial interest in the region.24 23

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Southey’s niece Sara Coleridge was the translator of Dobrizhoffer’s Account. Southey warmly writes of the work: ‘Perhaps there is no other [Jesuit publication] which gives so full and picturesque an account of savage life; it has a liveliness, an originality, a freshness which makes even garrulity attractive’. The Quarterly Review, 21 (1822), p. 278. The commercial and political omissions that characterize The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay were certainly not the products of authorial ignorance. Hemans and Southey were perhaps the most well informed poets of their day on the subjects of Spain and Spanish America. Both corresponded with the prominent London-based Spanish exile and intellectual Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841). Indeed, it was on Blanco White’s pseudonymous Letters from Spain by Don Leucadio Doblado, ‘one of the most powerful and impressive pictures perhaps ever drawn, of a young mind struggling against habit and superstition’, that Hemans based her narrator’s conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. Felicia Hemans, The Forest Sanctuary. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 296. Moreover, it was this text, Hemans claimed, that had given her the initial inspiration for The Forest Sanctuary. See Henry Fothergill Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, with Illustrations of her Literary Character from her Private Correspondence, 2 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836), I, p. 105. In addition to The Forest Sanctuary, Hemans published numerous poems on Spanish themes, namely ‘The Abencerrage’ (1819), Songs of the Cid (1822-23), The Siege of Valencia (1823), ‘Juana’ (1828), Songs of Spain (1834), as well as translations of early Spanish poets such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Francisco de Quevedo (Translations, 1818). Southey wrote even more extensively on Spain and Spanish America, as evidenced by his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797),

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While it is perhaps understandable that Hemans and Southey, both Tories, would have preferred a more sober depiction of Spanish America than their zealous liberal contemporaries, the stark blankness and morbidity that characterize their texts is arresting. Gone are Bullock’s parrots and gold ore, Planché’s mercenaries, and Ackermann’s scantily clad native bodies. One finds instead, in the case of The Forest Sanctuary, a landscape that is never described more specifically than as ‘a North American forest’ and a ‘wilderness’.25 Like Hemans, Southey chose a site of relative cultural blankness for A Tale of Paraguay, commenting on his poem, ‘[t]he circumstances which are true, are very few, very simple […] There is little or no passion in it’.26 And while, unlike The Forest Sanctuary, the setting of Southey’s Tale is identified, the fact that contemporary Paraguay was the least well known of the new Spanish American states serves to obscure and abstract the context of the poem.27

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his poems ‘Inscription for a Column at Truxillo’ (1797), ‘Ode: The Spanish Armada’ (1798), ‘Cortez. History is Philosophy, teaching by example’ (1799), ‘Chimalpoca. A monodrama, founded on an event in the Mexican history’ (1799), ‘Song of the Araucans, during a thunder-storm’ (1799), ‘The Peruvian’s Dirge over the Body of his Father’ (1805), Madoc (1805) and Roderick, Last of the Goths (1814), his translations of Amadis of Gaul (1803) and The Chronicle of the Cid (1808), his pseudonymous Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), his massive History of the Peninsular War (182332), and his numerous reviews of texts relating to Spain and Spanish America for The Quarterly Review and The Annual Register. Hemans, ‘Advertisement’. Robert Southey, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965) II, p. 102. What was known of Paraguay was outdated and related principally to the Jesuit missions that had been outlawed in 1768. As Alan Bewell points out, ‘[t]he social experiment that took place in the Jesuit “Republic” of Paraguay was a favourite topic among eighteenthcentury philosophes […] Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, and the ex-Jesuit Raynal celebrated the ‘republic’ of Paraguay as the realization of a communistic ideal’. Alan Bewell, ‘“A True Story ... of Evils Overcome:” Sacred Biography, Prophecy, and Colonial Disease in Southey’s Tale of Paraguay’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26. 2 (2004), p. 98. The 1784 text on which Southey based his poem, Martin Dobrizhoffer’s Historia de Abiponibus, forms a part of this body of work. Even at the time of its original publication, however, the Historia referred to a missionary system that had ceased to exist 15 years ago. And much had changed since the state of Paraguay separated from the Viceroyalty of La Plata and ousted its Spanish governor in 1811. The most important of these changes was the rise to absolute power of Paraguay’s isolationist dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. Throughout his reign (1814-40), Francia pursued a strict ‘policy of non-intercourse’ with both Europe and Paraguay’s powerful local neighbors in Río de la Plata. See John Hoyt Williams, ‘Woodbine Parish and the “Opening” of Paraguay’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 116. 4 (1972), p. 343. Merchants who traveled to Paraguay without a license were frequently detained for years and suffered the confiscation of their property. As

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The majority of the self-exiled protagonist’s narration in The Forest Sanctuary does not depict America itself, but rather a remembered Spain to which he can never return. Constantly longing for his native home, the narrator’s actual environment is portrayed in terms of lack and negation: ’Tis not the olive, with a whisper swaying, Not thy low ripplings, glassy water, playing Through my own chestnut groves, which fill mine ear [...] — I hear the winds of morn — Their sounds are not of this! — I hear the shiver Of the green reeds, and all the rustlings, borne From the high forest, when the light leaves quiver: Their sounds are not of this! — the cedars, waving, Lend it no tone: His wide savannahs laving, It is not murmur’d by the joyous river!28

While one may be tempted to hear in these sonic negations an echo of Keats’ ‘ditties of no tone’, the ‘unheard’ melodies of Hemans’ poem do not give rise to ‘more happy, happy love! | For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d’.29 Nor does the narrator’s sense of displacement, like Keats’, allow him to fill ‘some other Body — The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women’.30 Rather than identifying a multiplicitous negative capability in the absence of Spain, the negations that characterize the narrator’s America are distinctly not productive, not generative, and not life giving. The place where Hemans’ narrator settles is presented both as a visual cipher and as a location outside of human history and culture, a realm ‘where farewell ne’er was spoken’.31 More specifically, Hemans writes both colonial

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a result of the aggressive isolationism of its dictator, Paraguay was one of the only Spanish American states never to float a loan on the British stock exchange and also one of the few nations that had not been formally recognized by the British government by 1825. In this era of speculative mania, the absence of commerce with a country necessarily meant a scarcity of interest and of information. The most up-to-date and revealing accounts of the state were to be found in John and William Parish Robertsons’ Letters on Paraguay (1838-39), Francia’s Reign of Terror (1839), and Letters on South America (1843), but these works would not be published until the end of Francia’s regime. Hemans, I. iv. 32-34; I. vi. 46-52; italics added. John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period, 8th edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), pp. 905-06. John Keats, ‘To Richard Woodhouse’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, p. 948. Hemans, II. lxxiv. 681. In order to preserve the cultural vacuum he has found in America, this narrator, whose life exists principally in memory, actively seeks to cancel his own narration of those memories. As John M. Anderson points out, the protagonist consistently

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and Native American culture out of her poem. The protagonist’s self-exile to America is patently inconsistent with the reasons for which sixteenth-century Spaniards went to the New World, namely to seek wealth and social aggrandizement, and to promulgate the Catholic faith. But even the narrator’s more historically credible deeds as a conquistador are stripped of agency. In the account of his regiment’s attack on the natives of Peru, we encounter no blood-curdling details such as those found in the narrations of Cortés’ or Pizarro’s campaigns. Instead, the native population is abstracted, represented only as ‘Indian bow and spear’ or as a ‘javelin shower’, while the conquistadors themselves are depersonalized as ‘mountain deer’ that are ‘[h]emm’d in [their] camp’ by native assaults, or as ‘a tempest of despair’ spreading across the Andes. (I. xxiv. 212-15) Even the carnage of war is depersonalized and objectified: ‘Moonlight, on broken shields — the plain of slaughter, | The fountain-side — the low sweet sound of water’.32 And although the narrator originally proposed to return to South America after his conversion to Protestantism, he finds on his second arrival an America in which ‘the war-notes of [his] country rung’.33 As Gary Kelly observes, Spain ‘is already too present’ there, and the wanderer must flee north to find sanctuary beyond the bounds of imperial civilization, ‘[t]o hide in shades unpierc’d a mark’d and weary head’.34 In a deleted passage from the manuscript preface to The Forest Sanctuary, Hemans writes that the poem ‘is intended more as the record of a Mind, than as a tale abounding with romantic or extraordinary incident’.35 In this sense, the otherwise nondescript ‘oak’ described by the narrator as strangled by ‘a wild vine’ is refigured as a metaphor for private human

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(though, of course, ineffectually) ‘resist[s] the temptation to narration’ by refusing to narrate such dramatic scenes as his torture by the Inquisition and his emotion at his wife’s sea burial during the passage to America. See John M. Anderson, ‘The Triumph of Voice in Felicia Hemans’ The Forest Sanctuary’, in Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Julie Melnyk and Nanora Sweet (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 71. Of his torture in a dungeon of the Inquisition, the narrator elusively comments: ‘It is no tale | Even midst thy shades, thou wilderness, to tell!’ Hemans, II. xiv, 118-19. Similarly, of his feelings upon his wife’s death, the narrator merely states: ‘I will not speak of woe; I may not tell — | Friend tells not such to friend — the thoughts which rent | My fainting spirit’. Hemans, II. lxiii. 575-77. Hemans, I. xxix. 257-58. Hemans, II. lxviii. 626. Gary Kelly, ‘Death and the Matron: Felicia Hemans, Romantic Death, and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State’, in Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Julie Melnyk and Nanora Sweet (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 208; Hemans, II. lxiii. 628. Qtd. in Kelly, p. 207.

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consciousness: ‘Alas! Alas! — what is it that I see? | An image of man’s mind’, the narrator laments as he gazes upon the oak. (I. xi. 98-99) But in addition to granting her broader psychological latitude in depicting her European narrator, Hemans’ absorption of American nature in the protagonist’s mind serves a distinctly political function. Contemporary readers would undoubtedly have recognized in Hemans’ lofty oak, ‘[t]he crown’d one of the woods’ that ‘shrunk and died, those serpent folds among’, a symbol of Britain’s embattled imperial primacy. (I. xi. 85, 92) More concretely, Hemans’ negations of a palpable American reality and her insistence that America exists only in the mind of her protagonist would have evoked British investors’ anxieties as one after another Spanish American bond prospectus proved misleading, illusory, and in some cases, patently fabulous. Through its erasures and omissions, Hemans’ poem offers a metaphorized reflection of what Desmond Gregory has called Britain’s ‘almost invincible ignorance about conditions in Latin America’.36 In this respect, The Forest Sanctuary offers support to the warnings issued by conservative newspapers such as The Courier, The Morning Herald, and the weekly John Bull, namely that it was dangerous and unwise to invest in nations and companies about which too little was known.37 Signs of Britons’ ignorance were everywhere. From 1822 through 1825, every day seemed to announce the formation of a new mining outfit and a new roster of eager purchasers. The Annual Register recounted how naïve investors scrambled to buy any kind of Spanish American bond and stock, even those of which ‘scarcely any thing was known except the name’. Once the speculative mania was in full swing, companies needed to provide precious little data in order to awaken ‘all the gambling propensities of human nature’.38 Accordingly, loan prospectuses contained less and less concrete information. The prospectus for the General South American Mining Association, for example, only vaguely stated that South America ‘abound[s] in valuable minerals and contains inexhaustible

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Desmond Gregory, Brute New World: the Rediscovery of Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), p. 1. Hemans’ objective in emptying and interiorizing her forest landscape was certainly also a Protestant one, calculated to impugn what Hemans perceived as Catholic materialism. According to Hemans’ narrator, Catholicism ‘strives to bind | With [its] strong chains to earth, what is not earth’s — the mind!’ in flagrant denial of the fact that the light of true faith is ‘too bright’ for gaudy pomp and ceremony. Hemans, II. iv. 31, 35-36. Remembering the Protestant martyr Theresa as she ascended the pyre of the Inquisition, the narrator thus approvingly reflects that her ‘glad soul from earth was purified’. Hemans, I. xxxviii. 340. Dawson, p. 13. The Annual Register, 1824, p. 3.

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Resources in Gold, Silver, Quicksilver, Copper, and other metals’.39 Potential investors in the Potosí, La Paz and Peruvian Mining Association were told even less. That association’s prospectus simply read: ‘The mineral wealth of Peru, and particularly of Potosí, is too well-known to require any comment’.40 Many companies did not even have specific mines under contract when they solicited public subscription. Company directors often ‘used the first shareholder downpayment to dispatch agents to negotiate leases with local mine owners’ after only a cursory perusal of Alexander von Humboldt’s outdated and significantly unreliable reports on Spanish America’s mineral resources.41 Britons’ willful blindness to the issues in which they were investing was perhaps most dramatically evinced in 1822 when the infamous swindler Sir Gregor MacGregor floated a £200,000 loan to the imaginary Central American nation of Poyais, of which he claimed to be the ruler. To support the credibility of his hoax, MacGregor opened a Poyasian legation and office in London, selling land to prospective settlers. Flyers were circulated describing ‘the opulence of [Poyais’s] cosmopolitan capital St Joseph, which boasted not only elegant avenues and public buildings, but also an opera house’.42 And like the earlier Spanish chronicles sent back to Europe to bolster interest in the New World, the slew of books and pamphlets Macgregor published ‘praised this Garden of Eden where with minimal effort poor men could become rich’.43 Tragically, of the two hundred eager emigrants who sailed for Poyais, fewer than fifty ever returned to Britain. Most were killed by the local Mosquito Indians or expired from hunger and fever in the insalubrious jungles and swamplands of Central America. Needless to say, they died without ever having found a trace of Sir Gregor’s fabled avenues, parks, or opera house. Southey’s erasure of native culture and Spanish imperialism reinforces this message regarding the dangers of the Spanish American unknown. The last survivors of their tribe, Southey’s Guaraní protagonists are stripped of their culture and reduced to more basic means of procuring survival. Whereas (as Southey points out with some disgust) it was traditional in Guaraní society for the father to simulate the pains of childbed when his wife gave birth, that tradition had been rendered obsolete. When Monnema, the mother of the family, gives birth to a son, ‘This could not be done; he [Monnema’s 39 40 41 42 43

Qtd. in Dawson, p. 103. Qtd. in Dawson, p. 105. Dawson, pp. 102-3. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., pp. 41-42.

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husband] might not lay | The bow and those unerring shafts aside; [...] None being there who should the while provide | That lonely household with their needful food’.44 Likewise, although Monnema had been famed in her village for her skill in spinning pottery, ‘These occupations were gone by: the skill | Was useless now, which once had been her pride’.45 As in The Forest Sanctuary, this eradication of native culture is complemented by the erasure of Spanish colonialism. Indeed, the only European character in Southey’s poem is the well meaning but ultimately ineffectual Austrian Jesuit Martin Dobrizhoffer, on whose Historia de Abiponibus Southey’s poem is based.46 While Southey’s Guaraní protagonists all die, then, they are not destroyed by rapacious conquistadors, but rather by the melancholy of missionary life and by smallpox, that ‘dire disease […] Which Africa sent forth to scourge the West’. Smallpox, not the imperialism with which it was associated, is the ‘conquering malady’ that ultimately destroys Southey’s native protagonists.47 Southey’s Tale, however, presents something more than a flight from colonialism or an ominous reminder of Britons’ ignorance of Spanish America. Rather, it unmakes the enlightenment vision of benevolent colonialism.48 In the Histoire des Deux Indes (1772-80), a text Southey knew well, the Abbé Raynal had described the Jesuit settlements in Paraguay as paragons of good colonialism.49 He praised the ‘civilization’ of these societies, calling them ‘the most beautiful edifice that has been raised in the New World’.50 The

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Robert Southey, A Tale of Paraguay. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, with a Memoir, 10 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1837), IV, I. 29. Ibid., I. 24. The Jesuit reductions in Paraguay were not associated with Spanish rule but existed as independent theocracies whose work was to Christianize and to protect the native population from the forced labor of the Spanish encomienda system. Tale of Paraguay, I. 1, 9 Tim Fulford has argued that Southey’s Tale was ‘designed to promote missionary colonialism as a model Britain should follow in its own empire’. See ‘Blessed Bane: Christianity and Colonial Disease in Southey’s Tale of Paraguay’, Romanticism on the Net, 24 (2001) (para. 4 of 40). But if Southey’s Tale strives to produce a version of Christian colonialism that would rectify the misdeeds of rapacious empire-building, that goal is significantly undermined by the fact that ‘the missionary colonialism which Southey supported is seen’, like the commercial slavery Southey abhorred, ‘to bring about the Indians’ deaths’. Fulford, para. 34 of 40. Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, Abbé, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 10 vols (Genève: JeanLeonard Pellet, 1781), trans. by J. O. Justamond as Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 3rd edn, 8 vols (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1783), VIII, pp. 234-39. Raynal, VIII, pp. 253-54.

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Guaraní family of Southey’s Tale takes refuge, then, from a state without culture in a state of consummate culture. Whereas in Hemans’ American sanctuary, ‘farewell ne’er was spoken’, Southey’s natives must bid ‘a first and last farewell’ to their forest retreat in order to ‘mingle with the world’ in a town ‘of happiest polity’.51 But even while paying respect to Dobrizhoffer’s civilizing arts and paternal care, Southey frames the sacrifice that such care demands of its native recipients in terms that are more suggestive of domination than of protection: ‘his [Dobrizhoffer’s] whole careful course of life declares | That for their good he holds them thus in thrall, | Their Father and their Friend, Priest, Ruler, all in all’.52 In addition to his questionable authoritarianism, Southey stresses that Dobrizhoffer, like the Guaranís, will inevitably fall prey to the missionary system he represents: ‘It was his evil fortune to behold | The labours of his painful life destroy’d [...] And all of good that Paraguay enjoy’d | By blind and suicidal Power o’erthrown’.53 As David Simpson insightfully observes, Dobrizhoffer is engaged ‘in an historically failing enterprise; his painfully established Christian community would not survive the violence generated by the same imperialism that it contingently makes possible’.54 What we discover in Southey’s poem, then, is similar to what we find in The Forest Sanctuary, namely the irredeemable destructiveness (and self-destructiveness) of European imperial culture. Yet Hemans and Southey do not stop with erasing Spanish America as a site of culture and history. They not only strip bare their landscapes, they also render them as places of death. In lieu of experiencing America, Hemans’ protagonist experiences memory, specifically the memory of his dead wife Leonor and his dead friends Alvar, Inez, and Theresa. The New World becomes for him a place to experience human mortality, not human culture. From the outset of the poem, America is figured as a non-productive and non-reproductive space. Although the narrator and his son do reach America, the death of Leonor at sea and the depopulation of the American landscape render impossible any further propagation of human society. Not only is Leonor prevented from giving birth to a child in America, her body, ‘a thing

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Hemans, I. lxxiv. 681; Southey, Tale of Paraguay, III. 51, 13. Tale of Paraguay, IV. 7. Tale of Paraguay, III. 17. David Simpson, ‘Romantic Indians: Robert Southey’s Distinctions’, The Wordsworth Circle, 38. 1-2 (2007), 20-25 (p. 23). Simpson provides the subtext for this statement earlier in his essay: ‘Jesuit generosity is itself enabled only by the military conquest of the Guaranís by the Spaniards; it works to compensate for the very violence that makes its own good intentions both possible and necessary, and it is also itself an important agent of colonial settlement’. (p. 21)

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for earth’s embrace, | To cover with spring-wreaths’, is buried at sea and cannot join among the ‘blest | That earth to earth entrust’. Her ‘slumberer’s clay’ will never ‘rise at last, and bid the young flowers bloom, | That waft a breath of hope around the tomb’. Despite the joy the narrator takes in his ‘blessed child’, he can thus understandably cry, ‘’tis well to die, and not complain’.55 Although Southey’s poem, like Hemans’, ‘is a story of death’, his Guaranís, in some sense, face a kinder fate than Hemans’ Spanish exiles.56 With the passing of the Guaranís’ tribe, a benevolent nature will overwhelm and transform the place where culture dwelt. Southey writes of the natives’ demise: ‘On the white bones the mouldering roof will fall; | Seeds will take root, and spring in sun and shower; | And Mother Earth ere long with her

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Hemans, II. lvii. 527-28; lxi. 558-59; II. lxi. 560-62; I. x. 88. Recent scholarship, by contrast with this reading, has argued for the culturally reconstructive dimensions of death in Hemans’ poem. Gary Kelly claims that Hemans’ narrator ‘attempts to sublate’ the deaths of his friends that have been killed by the Inquisition ‘in his own subjective life, turning their otherwise meaningless deaths into meaningful ones’. Through this subjective recuperation of his loved ones, Hemans’ conquistador represents ‘a specifically “feminine” consciousness that disrupts the masculine discursive order’ and, as such, ‘remains as a vanguard consciousness of the post-Revolutionary world’. Kelly, pp. 207, 209. Other important critical work on Hemans’ writing substantiates this claim that death offers an opportunity for human renewal and for the validation of culturally redemptive, feminine-coded values. Nanora Sweet contends that the figure of death in poems such as ‘Stanzas on the Death of Princess Charlotte’ (1817), Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King (1820), and Dartmoor (1821), gives rise to a ‘feminization of national consciousness’ which in turn produces ‘sustaining domestic institutions’ in place of male-dominated martial institutions. Nanora Sweet, ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the PostNapoleonic Moment’, in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialism Criticism, ed. by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 179. Writing of The Forest Sanctuary, Marlon Ross suggests that in the absence of a maternal figure, ‘[e]arth and its elements become feminine presences’ and that ‘the father and the son begin self-consciously to create their own community of feminine affection’. Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 294. So too, in her reading of The Forest Sanctuary (in many respects a response to Ross’s), Nancy Moore Goslee emphasizes the ways in which Hemans’ evasion of the possibility of Spanish-Indian intermarriage, combined with the death of the narrator’s wife, forces the ‘maternal-enough father’ and his child to develop feminine virtues within themselves and through their relationship with the land. Nancy Moore Goslee, ‘Hemans’ “Red Indians:” Reading Stereotypes’, in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 243. Simpson, p. 22.

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green pall, | Resuming to herself the wreck, will cover all’.57 But while nature may be renewed through human death, Southey’s Paraguay, like Hemans’ America, is a place in which human reproduction cannot take place.58 Even before encountering Dobrizhoffer, the shadow of death is already upon Monnema and her husband Quiara. On the birth of their first son, Southey ominously predicts: ‘unto them a child is born: | And when the hand of Death may reach the one, | The other will not now be left to mourn | A solitary wretch’. And when the Guaraní family finally does reach the colonial village, Southey comments starkly: ‘these poor children of the solitude | Began ere long to pay the bitter pain | That their new way of life brought with it in its train’.59 Though the bones of their devastated tribe will enrich America’s soil, the Guaraní protagonists themselves are inevitably bound to die from the outset of the poem. At the same time, the deaths of Southey’s native characters are perhaps more disturbing than the death of Hemans’ Leonor. While Hemans’ narrator and son will eventually fade away, their demise is figured as the extension of a pious life of pastoral isolation. By contrast, Southey affirms that death is ‘best’ for the Guaranís, that their death is more ‘proper’ than their life. Writing of Mooma, the daughter of Monnema and Quiara, Southey assures his readers that death will in fact provide her with a more fitting home than culture ever could: Mourn not for her! for what hath life to give That should detain her ready spirit here? Thinkest thou that it were worth a wish to live, Could wishes hold her from her proper sphere? That simple heart, that innocence sincere The world would stain […] Maiden beloved of Heaven, to die is best for thee!60

Confirming that it is the natives themselves who prefer death to culture, Southey adds that ‘in his heart’ Mooma’s brother Yeruti ‘said to die betimes 57

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Tale of Paraguay, I. 12. Southey’s use of the word ‘pall’ to characterize the verdure of ‘Mother Earth’ casts some doubt on the notion that the Guaranís’ death is counterbalanced by organic rebirth. In his insistence on native non-reproductiveness in the mission, Southey takes an important liberty from his source text. In his review of Dobrizhoffer’s Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, Southey himself notes that, although the native population ‘was on the whole declining’ in the Jesuit reductions, it was also ‘increasing in some of these settlements’. ‘Review of an Account of the Abipones’, p. 286. Tale of Paraguay, I. 31; IV. 28. Tale of Paraguay, IV. 48.

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was best’. If in the midst of such morbidity, the reader recalls the Dedication to the poem, in which Southey presents a paean to the joys of fatherhood, the fate of the Guaranís seems crueler still.61 Just as the absence of Spanish American culture in these poems reflects the ignorance of British investors in the region, the poems’ overwhelming insistence on death allegorizes the subsequent ruin of these investors and, potentially, of their nation. In December 1821, Southey wrote to Walter Savage Landor: Nothing can be more mournful than the course of events abroad. All that the SpanishAmericans wanted they would have obtained now, in the course of events, without a struggle if they had waited quietly. A free trade could not, from the first, have been refused them, nor any internal regulations which they thought good; and now the separation would have taken place unavoidably. As it is, it has cost twelve years of crime and misery.62

Southey was not thinking only of the ‘misery’ of Spanish Americans. Anticipating the dire repercussions of Britain’s over-zealous investment, he continued: ‘Of [disaffection] we shall hear plentifully when the bills of restriction are expired, and of [distress] also, when it shall be found (as it will be) that the renewed activity of our manufacturers will have again glutted the South American markets’.63 Southey’s letters of this period, moreover, express what Alan Bewell has called the ‘belief that England was about to be visited by a plague brought on by materialist commercialism’.64 As Southey warned in 1820: ‘It is a frightful thought, but it has occurred to me […] that Providence may send pestilence among us […] to punish us’.65 In his Colloquies, he explained the grounds for this concern: ‘as the intercourse between nations has become greater, the evils of one have been communicated to another […] Diseases […] find their way from one part of the inhabited globe to another, wherever it is possible for them to exist’.66 A year later, as the cholera was ‘closing round’ him, Southey harked back to his predictions of 1820, writing that the disease had perhaps been sent by

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Tale of Paraguay, IV. 54-5. Southey writes to his daughter Edith May: ‘How have I doted on thine infant smiles | At morning, when thine eyes unclosed on mine’. ‘Dedication’, p. 5. Southey, New Letters, II, pp. 230-31. New Letters, II, p. 232. Bewell, p. 119. Robert Southey, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by John Wood Warter, 4 vols (London: John Murray, 1831), III, pp. 184-85. Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: Or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1829), I, pp. 57-58.

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‘Providence’ to spare Britain ‘from the consequences which the manufacturing system must otherwise inevitably produce’.67 In this very literal sense, the death by colonial disease of Southey’s Guaraní protagonists represents the dire effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of British industrialism and informal imperialism. As early as 1823, these effects were beginning to be acutely felt in Britain. Blackwood’s early warning that the Spanish American ‘bubble’ would ‘burst to the ruin of thousands’ had proven all too true.68 In a letter reprinted in The New Times, a British merchant in South America warned that the Colombians were ‘by no means in that state of moral advancement which I find many persons in England erroneously suppose them to be’. British investors should not be so gullible as to expect Colombia to uphold ‘those sacred principles upon which the established Governments of Europe maintain their credit’.69 Later that year, The Morning Herald increased investors’ fears by printing a letter from an English merchant in Bogotá, complaining that Colombia was ‘entirely destitute of funds’ and that because the 1822 bonds had been ‘given by persons who had not the power to do so, they […] will be liable to heavy deductions’.70 Reports regarding corruption and governmental instability throughout Spanish America, stock jobbing, fraud, the freezing of funds, the deferral of loan payments, and loan rescissions flooded the press. Lawsuits proliferated as disgruntled investors, denied their promised subscription installments, sought government intervention and relief, to no avail. Meanwhile, the Rio Plata Mining Association, whose prospectus had claimed that grains of gold ‘appear in sight when the rain washes away the dust’ had its land concession revoked. Infuriated investors learned that even had the concession been respected, the company’s mines were ‘too far removed from supplies, transport, water and ports’, that the ‘climate was hot, dry, and inhospitable’, and that ‘local authorities were corrupt, unreliable, and shameless in demanding bribes’.71 In addition to a foreign and treacherous climate, ventures suffered from bad roads, insufficient ports, and the fact that many of the mines had been neglected, and consequently

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Selections, IV, pp. 285, 290. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1819, p. 109. The New Times, 28 Jan. 1823, p. 2. The Morning Herald, 25 July, 1823, p. 3. The Colombian loan was transacted by Francisco Antonio Zea; Antonio José de Irisarrí negotiated the Chilean loan. Dawson, p. 121. The full extent of investors’ deception by the Rio Plata Mining Association is detailed in Francis Bond Head’s Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes (1826), excerpts of which were reprinted in the London press soon after its publication. See The Annual Register, 1826, pp. 392-94.

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flooded, during fifteen years of civil war. British mining technology did not adapt itself well to the Spanish American landscape, the ore was not as rich as had been predicted, local labor was difficult to come by, and miners and their materials had to be brought, at significant cost, from England. Given these challenges, even the most well capitalized companies were grossly underfinanced and British investors quickly came to realize ‘that the “El Dorado” which they had expected to find in Spanish America simply was not there’.72 Ever outspoken in its skepticism, The New Times accordingly urged its readers to refuse ‘the insane project of sending millions of money to God knows whom at Mexico’.73 This disillusionment was vividly manifest in contemporary travel narratives as well as in the periodicals that reviewed them. Treatments of Spanish America, once unboundedly enthusiastic, increasingly exposed the degree to which previous misinformation had created false hopes and investors’ subsequent ruin. In January of 1824, The Quarterly (a publication that generally supported trade liberalization with Spanish America) reviewed three recent travel narratives about Spanish America, Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, Captain Basil Hall’s Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, and Peter Schmidtmeyer’s Travels to Chile. The reviewer stressed the ‘exaggerated, and often very erroneous representations’ provided by most reports from Spanish America, blaming British visitors for ‘reporting what they were told rather than what they saw’ and thereby ‘rais[ing] the most extravagant ideas of […] fertility, wealth, populousness, and civilization’. By contrast, he lauded Hall’s, Schmidtmeyer’s, and Graham’s unromantic accounts of war-torn Lima as ‘the purgatory of men’, of ‘[t]he once productive mines of Tiltil’ as ‘abandoned’, and of the social customs of Chile, in which fashionable diners eat ‘from the general dish without the intervention of a plate’ and highranking ladies squat on the floor and spit.74 Shuddering at such ‘grossness of 72 73

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Jones, p. 176. The New Times, 19 November 1823, p. 2. More comically, a phony theatrical handbill appeared on the walls of the London Stock Exchange in 1823, announcing a new play entitled ‘The South American Jugglers’, and starring one Don Juan de Rowley Powley and one Don Carlos de Herring-Guts. These names were clearly intended to mock one of the principal loan contracting outfits responsible for the Colombian loan, namely the firm of Herring, Graham, and Powles. Herring was also one of the principal contractors involved in floating the Mexican loan. Basil Hall, Extracts from a Journal, written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico in the years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1824) I. pp. 108110; ‘Chili, Peru, &c.,’ The Quarterly Review, 30 (Jan. 1824), 441-472 (p. 461); Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to

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manners’, the reviewer recommended these tales of deprivation and depravity as useful correctives to other ‘too favourable statements’.75 The disenchantment evinced in such texts reached its apotheosis during the stock market crash and ‘panic’ of 1825. Heavy over-speculation in Spanish American imports had resulted in an over-supply that caused stock and bond prices to plummet. The much-anticipated Spanish American markets for British commodities had proven woefully inadequate to their supply. A frightening number of prestigious British trading firms and banks collapsed, taking smaller country banks along with them. The gold reserves of the Bank of England ran dangerously low. A freeze was placed on credit and payments were suspended. Shareholders defaulted on their purchase installments, began to sell their shares at enormous loss, and even dissolved their associations. Trading at the Foreign Stock Exchange ground to a halt. In the last three weeks of December alone, over seventy financial institutions failed or suspended payments. By the end of the year, over a thousand private bankruptcies had been reported and, as The Annual Register noted, ‘the agitation in the City [London] exceeded every thing of the kind that had been witnessed for many years […] All the usual channels of credit were stopped; and the circulation of the country was completely deranged’.76 The gloves were now off. In its coverage of Mexico’s first congressional meeting, The Annual Register disparaged the President’s declaration that ‘America […] has resolved the problem which most interests the human race’ by directing ‘desolating beams’ upon ‘despotism’, with the biting comment: ‘It is melancholy to think, how low in point of intellect that legislative assembly must be, to whose ears such rhapsodies and nonsense can be acceptable’. The Annual winced, too, at the ‘matchless effusion of pedantry and bombast’ that characterized the Bolivian President’s address to the Congress of Panama. The President spoke, according to The Annual, ‘with a zeal and copiousness betraying not merely bad taste, but poverty and barrenness of mind, want of experience, ignorance of all that is worth knowing, and an absence of the habits of thought which are required in active life’. The Annual complained that Spanish America’s leaders ‘speak and […] write like boys who have just left school, as if their minds had been stationary since they attained the age of puberty: they exhibit scarcely a single trace of a reason accustomed to observe human affairs, to analyze their combinations, or follow their consequences.’ Surely such incapacity was the

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Brazil in 1823, ed. by Jennifer Hayward (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 67-68, 74-75. ‘Chili, Peru, &c.’, pp. 454, 441-42. The Annual Register, 1825, pp. 122-24.

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mark of a ‘defective turn of mind’. As a result of such alleged incompetence, ‘disunion and uncertainty, theoretical symmetry, and practical confusion’ reigned and no one could ‘feel the least confidence that what existed to-day would exist to-morrow’.77 Romantic-era Britain’s longstanding romance with Spanish America was, it seemed, officially dead.

British Conquistadors and Spanish Capitalists By troping the death of a Spanish conquistador in North America and the decimation of the Guaraní in Paraguay as properly British calamities, The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay continue the strategies of earlier British treatments of Spanish America. Works by Helen Maria Williams, John Thelwall, Thomas Morton, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Southey himself had identified the Briton with the Spanish American through the nationalist rhetoric of victimization, according to which sincerity and vulnerability are the guarantors of moral legitimacy and political power. But while The Forest Sanctuary and A Tale of Paraguay certainly recall such proprietary gestures of identification, they deviate from works such as Peru (1784) and Pizarro (1799) by presenting the devastation of America as irremediable by British authority. Gone are the glorious hopes of Britain’s complete commercial penetration of an independent Spanish America that had underwritten Williams’ and Sheridan’s texts. By 1825, these hopes had indeed been realized and, rather than stimulating the British economy, they seemed to have precipitated its collapse. During the year of Britain’s worst financial catastrophe in over a century, the narrative by which Native American victimization stands for and tacitly authorizes British imperial dominance must indeed have been worn very thin. And so, ironically, Britain’s fascination with Spanish America comes to a grinding halt at the precise moment of its long-awaited consummation. The consequence of this disappointment was not only disenchantment with Spanish America, but also with Britain’s policy of informal empire in the region. Rueful commentators repudiated their earlier ambitions, and in a stunning volte face even suggested that Spanish protectionism had been less harmful to all parties than British free trade. As one writer for The Quarterly assessed the situation: Much had been said of the monopolies by which, under the Spanish colonial system, European goods were rendered to the consumers at enormously high prices. We suspect 77

The Annual Register, 1826, pp. 199, 419, 420.

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those evils to have been over stated, and believe they arose more from the extent of capitals in classes of individuals, than from any regulations of the government. They more resembled the monopoly enjoyed by the brewers and distillers of London, than that which the laws have conferred, in the case of tea, on the East-India Company.78

In fact, the same writer maintains, colonial monopoly offered freer trade to Spanish America than the ostensibly free trade system of the new republics. ‘The situation of trade in Chili does not seem to be bettered by the introduction of this boasted freedom which the republicans have bestowed upon it’, he argues, bemoaning the fact that ‘[t]he same influence which was exercised by individual capitalists is now exercised by those at the head of affairs’.79 With these words, the writer effectively converted the long-berated Spanish monopoly system into a more familiar series of local ventures by individual capitalists. Whereas throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Spanish American revolutions were justified according to the economic principles they shared with Britain, now those revolutions were denounced as commercially retrograde and authoritarian. Defeated by its own commercial enlightenment, Britain now transferred to its Spanish American allies the stigma of economic backwardness it had once applied to their Spanish tyrants. By contrast with the now maligned Spanish American republicans, the former Spanish colonialists emerge as a lost population to be mourned. Basil Hall opines that ‘the sinking race of Spaniards’ in America are far better informed men, more industrious, and more highly bred than the natives in general. As merchants they are active, enterprising, and honourable in their dealings […] They are much less tainted with bigotry than the natives; they are men, taken generally, of pleasing conversation and manners, and habitually obliging to all.80

The Quarterly echoed these sentiments: ‘These men were not only possessed of the capital, but of what intellect and commercial integrity was to be found in those countries […] All of them were in succession stripped of the wealth which they possessed, and in many instances they were first either secretly or openly put to death, without even the shadow of a trial’.81 Whereas in previous years, British writers had depicted the native and creole inhabitants of Spanish America as the victims of Spanish prejudice and unjust persecution, now the roles were reversed. And Britons were ever ready to 78 79 80 81

‘Chili, Peru, &c.’, p. 464. Ibid., p. 464. Hall, II, p. 285. ‘Chili, Peru, &c.’, p. 466.

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take the side of the victim — that is, when that side corresponded with their own interests. Popular entertainments of the time also suggest parallels, not between patriotic Britons and revolutionary Spanish Americans, but rather between British and Spanish imperialists. Under the guise of a conquest-era Mexican set piece, Planché’s Cortez (discussed above), presents a thinly veiled allegory of contemporary British speculation in Spanish America. The play opens with a chorus of Spaniards attempting to flee their Mexican foes and retreat to Cuba. Cortez’s farrier Sancho explains the reason for this intended flight in terms that directly echo the sentiments of disillusioned investors in Mexican mines: ‘Cortez promised us gold for the gathering — dainty gathering truly! marry, an’ I am to purchase booty at the expense of my brains’.82 Indeed, ‘gold for the gathering’ was precisely what British companies such as the vaunted Real del Monte Mining Association had promised. And like the speculators The New Times had deemed ‘insane’, Sancho had good reason to lament that he must obtain his promised loot ‘at the expense of [his] brains.’ To Sancho’s complaint, the soldier Diego answers with a tellingly dark off-repetition of the familiar stock solicitation: ‘ ’Twill cost thee next to nothing […] but silence’. Another dissenter, Velasquez de Leon, joins in: ‘Cortez has deceived us. Must we be sacrificed to his ambition and imprudence? What can a handful of men effect against millions?’ (I.i.2) In this response, Velasquez personifies the millions of ‘vastly underrated’ obstacles besetting the new mining companies as ‘millions’ of native adversaries.83 And the sanguinary Cortez, in his role as overzealous mining company director, casts a harsh light on the ostensibly enlightened humanitarianism of British activity in Spanish America. Rallying his timorous followers, Cortez argues: Have you scarcely found footing in this fairy region, where spring for ever reigns upon the earth, and summer wantons in the air? Whose rivers, shaming Lydian Pactolus, have waves of silver rolling over sands of gold? And do you start thus early at the mere dream of danger […] The eyes of the old world are upon you; the new one is in your grasp […] Cortez will share […] his wealth with none but the enterprising.84

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James Robinson Planché, Cortez; or, The Conquest of Mexico. An Historical Drama in Three Acts (London: John Lowndes, 1823), I.i.2. Parenthetical citations include act, scene, and line number(s). Dawson, p. 112. Planché, I.i.16. It will be recalled that in The Age of Bronze (1823), Byron also compares the illusory wealth of British speculators with the real wealth of the classical world: That magic palace of Alcina shows More wealth than Britain ever had to lose,

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Accordingly, like the gullible investors who cast in their lot under the sway of persuasion, Cortez’s men rally to his banner, crying: ‘We’ll follow Cortez! [...] Yes! we swear it. We’ll swear any thing!’ (I.i.16) Audiences must have laughed with bitter recognition at the retrograde imperialism of Planché’s modern-day speculator when Cortez announced to his restive followers: ‘I will plant [the cross] in triumph, amid the ruins of idolatry; I will overturn yonder horrible altars, red with the blood of human victims, my cause is that of glory and the true faith’. (I.i.3) After all, was not the cause of British capitalists also that of ‘glory’ and the new ‘true faith?’ In the end, despite the early dissension of his men, Cortez (and with him, the promise of Spanish American investment) manages to win an unlikely, last minute victory. Deviating conspicuously from his ‘faithfully followed’ historical sources, Planché closes his play with the bloodless reconciliation of Montezuma and Cortez.85 As Montezuma welcomes the Spaniards into his city, he complacently declares: ‘Brave General […] I accept the embassy of the King who sends you, and lay my empire at his feet’. And lest viewers miss the purport of this victory as the unlikely vindication of their speculative ventures, Planché renders the message unmistakable by stressing that Cortez eschews Montezuma’s proffered conquest in favor of open commerce. He thus thanks Montezuma for his offer, but claims that Spain desires only ‘to open a communication between the two monarchies, and join in lasting amity

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Were all her atoms of unleavened ore, And all her pebbles from Pactolus’ shore. There Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake, And the world trembles to bid brokers break. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Age of Bronze. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), VII, 15. 664-69. Planché, ‘Advertisement.’ Directed by Cortés, Montezuma entreated his people to desist in their war against the Spanish. As Robertson recounts, ‘[w]hen he ended his discourse, a sullen murmur of disapprobation ran through the ranks; to this succeeded reproaches and threats; and the fury of the multitude rising in a moment above every restraint of decency or respect, flights of arrows and volley of stones poured in so violently upon the ramparts, that before the Spanish soldiers, appointed to cover Montezuma with their bucklers, had time to lift them in his defence, two arrows wounded the unhappy monarch, and the blow of a stone on his temple struck him to the ground […] The Spaniards […] carried Montezuma to his apartments, and Cortés hastened thither to console him under his misfortune. But the unhappy monarch now perceived how low he was sunk; and […] scorned to survive this last humiliation, and to protract an ignominious life, not only as the prisoner and tool of his enemies, but as the object of contempt or detestation among his subjects. In a transport of rage he tore the bandages from his wounds, and refused, with such obstinacy, to take any nourishment, that he soon ended his wretched days’. William Robertson, The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1856), p. 236.

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their respective rulers’. (III.v.49-50) Cortez’s claim that he comes to Mexico in order to establish a mutually beneficial exchange between Spain and the New World ingeniously resists the distinction between Spanish conquest and British informal empire. But while the conqueror’s success implies that of contemporary investment in Spanish America, the counter-factualism of that success places a distinct strain on the play’s encouraging message. Informed viewers would undoubtedly have noticed Planché’s unfaithfulness to the historical record. They had only to continue the metaphor according to which British informal imperialism recapitulates Spanish conquest in order to conclude that Planché’s happy ending was a misrepresentation, both of Cortés’ military invasion and, more importantly, of Britain’s economic penetration of Spanish America. William Bullock’s Mexican Exhibition of the following year continued Planché’s strategy of troping speculation as conquest.86 Bullock’s use of the word ‘enterprise’ in his praise of ‘[t]he ardour and enterprise of the British merchant’ particularly recalls Planché’s description of Cortez’s Mexican conquest as ‘enterprizing’.87 Bullock’s rhetoric also repeats that of the Spanish chroniclers themselves, a gesture that serves to emphasize the continuity between British and Spanish imperialism. Just as Bernal Díaz del Castillo (the eyewitness observer of Cortés’ Mexican campaign), attends carefully to the produce of Mexico and is eager to aver the reality of his claims, ‘minutely detail[ing] every article exposed for sale in [Mexico’s] great market’ and insisting that ‘what I have stated is a fact’, so too Bullock notes that all of the ‘produce’ in his display is ‘indeed reality’.88 Reiterating, 86

87 88

Robert Aguirre emphasizes, by contrast with this argument, that Bullock’s exhibition contrasted ‘the Spanish model of violent military domination with the British model of gentlemanly, informal, and ‘reciprocal’ engagements’. Aguirre, Informal, p. 22. In his Descriptive Catalogue for the exhibition entitled Ancient and Modern Mexico, Bullock celebrates ‘the reciprocal advantages’ attending ‘an intercourse of the most liberal and extended nature between the Mexican and British nations.’ He condemns the Spanish conquerors as ‘a band of desperate adventurers’ and their colonialist descendants as ‘oppressive, yet indolent taskmasters’, claiming that Mexico ‘wanted but the fostering hand of a free, enlightened, and enterprising European nation, to raise them to that rank, which in every political point of view, their situation so well entitled them to enjoy.’ Bullock then triumphantly asserts that Britain is that ‘protecting power’. Descriptive, pp. iii, 19, iv. Descriptive Catalogue, iv; Planché, Cortez, I.i.16. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Memoirs of Bernal Diaz del Castillo written by himself Containing a True and Full Account of the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain, trans. by John Ingram Lockhart, 2 vols (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), I, p. 236; Descriptive Catalogue, pp. 5-6. By reiterating the Spanish insistence on veracity, Bullock works to vindicate the validity of the chronicles’ glowing tales of Mexico after their repudiation by enlightenment-era historians, particularly William Robertson. The accounts

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at times almost verbatim, Díaz’s account of ancient Mexico’s ‘majestic […] temples, towers, and houses’, Bullock remarks on the modern city’s ‘beautiful churches, palaces, and noble streets’.89 By borrowing the Spaniards’ descriptions of their encounter with ancient Mexico to ‘justify and corroborate’ his own observations on modern Mexico, Bullock creates a historical and discursive continuity by which contemporary Britain is the improver and continuator of the Spanish conquest.90 As Bullock enthusiastically comments: ‘Mexico, the unreal El Dorado of Elizabethan times, seems destined to become, in our day, really what it was pictured centuries ago’.91 Yet as the works of Hemans and Southey suggest, modern Britain’s resemblance to sixteenth-century Spain was not ultimately as auspicious as Planché and Bullock might have liked to imagine. Despite the critical expositions of modern Spanish America offered by writers such as Graham, Hall, and Schmidtmeyer, many Britons continued to invest in the region without the slightest interest in or knowledge of its actual conditions. Indeed, William Robertson’s comment that the Spanish conquerors ‘undertook their expedition in quest of one object [‘plunder’], and seemed hardly to have turned their eyes toward any other’ might have been applied with equal justice to the members of the General South American or the Potosí, La Paz and Peruvian Mining Associations, those British entities which, as Dawson asserts, came to ‘replace the Spaniards as conquistadores’.92 To be sure, with the bursting of the Spanish American bubble, Britons were forced to acknowledge the ways in which their devastation resembled, not that of the

89 90

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of Mexico given by its conquerors, Robertson wrote in 1777, were but ‘the inquiries of illiterate soldiers […] conducted with so little sagacity and precision’ that the end results are ‘superficial, confused, and inexplicable’. Robertson, p. 314. Taking direct aim at such statements, Bullock writes: ‘no author is more mistaken than our illustrious Robertson, whose well written volume contains no information on the former state of America’. Ancient Mexico, p. 6. Díaz, p. 219; Descriptive Catalogue, p. 5 William Bullock, A description of the unique exhibition, called Ancient Mexico; collected on the spot in 1823 … and now open for public inspection at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (London: 1824), p. 8 William Bullock, Catalogue of the exhibition called Modern Mexico; containing a panoramic view of the present city, specimens of the natural history of New Spain … at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (London: 1824), p. 3. After asserting the parallels between his own information-gathering ‘enterprise’ in Mexico and that of Díaz, Bullock extends the parallel to the British viewing public, who will imminently need such information ‘in so far as our new relations [with Mexico] are about to be actively cultivated’. Descriptive Catalogue, p. 21; Modern Mexico, p. 5. Thus British audiences shared in the imperial project of discovery as they gazed upon the modern produce and ancient artifacts of Mexico. Robertson, p. 314; Dawson, p. 3.

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Americans, but rather that of America’s conquerors. A pathetic letter reprinted in The Morning Chronicle — that one time champion of Spanish American speculation — exemplified the tragedy. In January of 1826, one ruined man wrote that he had purchased Peruvian bonds at their highest price, only to watch them fall and crash. ‘[U]nless some remittances come from Peru before next April’, he worried, ‘nothing can be looked for’.93 When April came, Peru suspended payments on its loan. The anonymous investor signed himself ‘Pizarro.’ As this British ‘Pizarro’ realized all too well, the concomitant destruction of Spain and Britain’s dominance in Spanish America had effectively dissolved the enlightenment opposition between informal and formal imperialism.

Bibliography Periodicals The Annual Register, 1824-26. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1819. The Courier, 18 June 1825. The Morning Chronicle, 29 October 1823, 4 December 1823, 10 January 1826. The Morning Herald, 25 July 1823. The New Monthly Magazine, October 1824. The New Times, 14 October 1822; 28 January 1823; 19 November 1823. Primary and Secondary Sources Aguirre, Robert, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) Anderson, John M. ‘The Triumph of Voice in Felicia Hemans’ The Forest Sanctuary’, Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Julie Melnyk and Nanora Sweet (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 55-73. Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest, ‘Southey in the Tropics: A Tale of Paraguay and the Problem of Romantic Faith’, The Wordsworth Circle, 5.2 (Spring 1974), 97-104.

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Bewell, Alan, ‘“A True Story … of Evils Overcome:” Sacred Biography, Prophecy, and Colonial Disease in Southey’s Tale of Paraguay’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26. 2 (2004), 97-124. Bullock, William, Catalogue of the Exhibition called Modern Mexico; containing a panoramic view of the present city, specimens of the natural history of New Spain…at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London, 1824. ——, A Description of the Unique Exhibition, called Ancient Mexico; collected on the spot in 1823 … and now open for public inspection at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (London: 1824) ——, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Exhibition, entitled Ancient and Modern Mexico; containing a panoramic view of the present city, specimens of the natural history of New Spain … at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (London: 1824) Byron, George Gordon, Lord, The Age of Bronze. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, Vol. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) ‘Chili, Peru, &c.,’ The Quarterly Review, 30 (Jan. 1824), 441-472. Chorley, Henry Fothergill, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, with Illustrations of her Literary Character from her Private Correspondence, 2 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836) Dawson, Frank Griffith, The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and the 1822-25 Loan Bubble (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990) Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, The Memoirs of Bernal Diaz del Castillo written by himself Containing a True and Full Account of the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain, trans. by John Ingram Lockhart, 2 vols (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844) Ferns, H. S. Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960) Fodor, Giorgio, ‘The Boom that Never Was? Latin American Loans in London 1822-1825’, Discussion Paper No. 5 (Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento, Dipartimento di Economia, 2002) Fulford, Tim, ‘Blessed Bane: Christianity and Colonial Disease in Southey’s Tale of Paraguay’, Romanticism on the Net, 24 (2001) Goslee, Nancy Moore, ‘Hemans’ ‘Red Indians:’ Reading Stereotypes’, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 237-61.

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Graham, Maria, Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, ed. by Jennifer Hayward (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003) Gregory, Desmond, Brute New World: the Rediscovery of Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993) Hall, Basil, Extracts from a Journal, written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico in the years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1824) Head, Francis Bond, Reports Relating to the Failure of the Rio Plata Mining Association (London: 1827) Hemans, Felicia, The Forest Sanctuary. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 268-322. Jones, Calvin, ‘Spanish-America in Selected British Periodicals, 1800-1830’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Kentucky, 1966) Kaufmann, William W. British Policy and the Independence of Latin America, 1804-1828 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951) Keats, John, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period, 8th edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), pp. 905-06. ——, ‘To Richard Woodhouse’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period, 8th edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), pp. 947-48. Kelly, Gary, ‘Death and the Matron: Felicia Hemans, Romantic Death, and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State’, Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Julie Melnyk and Nanora Sweet, (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 196-211. Metcalf, Thomas R., Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Platt, D. C. M. Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 18151914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) Planché, James Robinson, Cortez; or, The Conquest of Mexico. An Historical Drama in Three Acts (London: John Lowndes, 1823) Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) Quennell, Peter (ed.) The Private Letters of Princess Lieven to Prince Metternich 1820-1826 (London: John Murray, 1948) Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, abbé, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 10 vols, (Genève: Jean-Leonard Pellet, 1781), trans. by J. O.

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Justamond as Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 3rd edn, 8 vols (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1783) Robertson, William, The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1856) Ross, Marlon, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Simpson, David, ‘Romantic Indians: Robert Southey’s Distinctions’, The Wordsworth Circle. 38. 1-2 (2007), 20-25. Southey, Robert, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, Ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855) ——, New Letters of Robert Southey, Ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965) ——, ‘Review of An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, Translated from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, Eighteen Years a Missionary in that Colony’, The Quarterly Review, 21 (1822), 277-323. ——, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by John Wood Warter, 4 vols (London: John Murray, 1831) ——, Sir Thomas More: Or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1829) ——, A Tale of Paraguay. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, with a Memoir, 10 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1837) IV Sweet, Nanora, ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment’, in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialism Criticism, ed. by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 170-84. [Unidentified], The Vision of the Sun; or, The Orphan of Peru, 1823, Larpent MS 2343. Williams, John Hoyt, ‘Woodbine Parish and the ‘Opening’ of Paraguay’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 116. 4 (1972), 343-49.

María Eugenia Perojo Arronte

Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Exchange, and the Idea of a Spanish ‘National’ Literature This paper explores the role that Antonio Alcalá Galiano (1789-1865), one of the leading intellectuals and active politicians of the first half of the nineteenth century, had in the reception of British Romanticism in Spain.1 His residence in England as an exile during the time of the Absolutist Regime of Ferdinand VII gave way to a shift in his literary and political ideals. Galiano’s view of British literature and politics was decisive for his conception of a Spanish national literature, alien to the clichés of contemporary movements, and, at the same time, intimately related to his political liberal program.

The reception and impact of British Romanticism in Spain in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries proved decisive for a renewal of Spanish poetry, as recent criticism has shown. Undoubtedly, this impact is strongly felt in the twentieth century, but the seeds — and very relevant ones — were sown in the nineteenth century. One can speak of a line of reception stemming from the first decades of the nineteenth century and astonishingly continuing up to the present. In its early stages, this reception was understood by relevant intellectual personalities of the time, most of them political émigrés in England from 1824 to 1834, as the means of shaping a national literature for Spain, which they found in a state of decay caused by the political circumstances of the nation in the preceding two centuries. The Inquisition, the imposition of French Neoclassical rules and models, and political upheaval had left Spanish culture in a state of prostration from which it was necessary to redeem it. The most outstanding Spanish intellectuals and writers of the time, with the final imposition of Ferdinand VII’s absolutist regime, gathered in London.2 Three figures stand out conspicuously: José María Blanco White, José Joaquín de Mora, and Antonio Alcalá Galiano. It was the heyday of British Romanticism and they encountered intense literary activity, so very unlike what they had left behind in Spain, that it immediately fascinated them and marked their intellectual, 1

2

I wish to thank David Howlett and Roberto Cid for their help at various stages of the composition of this paper. See Vicente Lloréns, Liberales y románticos. Una emigración española en Inglaterra (18231834), 2nd edn (Madrid: Castalia, 1968).

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literary, and political bent for the rest of their lives. Each one of them was to follow his own path. Blanco White would remain in England till his last days. Mora migrated to South America in 1826, and became a leading figure in the intellectual life of many of the recently emancipated Spanish colonies. Alcalá Galiano returned to Spain in 1834, thanks to the last amnesty granted to the political exiles (the death penalty had hung over him since 1823). Consequently, he was the first ambassador of British Romanticism in Spain. He is the author of what has been considered the first Spanish Romantic manifesto, the ‘Preface’ to Ángel de Saavedra’s romance composition El moro expósito, published in Paris in 1834. From then onwards, he insistently commended the British literary model to Spanish writers. To him, British literature represented the ‘just mean’ against the excesses of both French Neoclassicism and French Romanticism that Spanish authors had persisted in importing. While in England, he became a first rate advocate of Spanish literature, with important contributions in The Westminster Review, The Foreign Quarterly Review and The Athenaeum, and also during his time as Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at London University.3 Antonio Alcalá Galiano was born in Cádiz in 1789 and died in Madrid in 1865 after a long and eventful life. He was an anglophile from a very early age thanks to the education he received at home. He had a good command of the English language and was well acquainted with English culture and politics. Cádiz, his birthplace, was one of the richest cities in Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, a seaport with an important commercial exchange with South America, Britain, and other parts of the world. These circumstances favoured the city for a leading role in the politics of the time. Young Galiano was a direct personal witness of the elaboration of the first Spanish Constitution at the Cortes of Cádiz in 1812. Later, he would become one of the leaders of liberalism. Politics and literature went hand in hand throughout his life, with a significant, parallel evolution that must always be taken into account for a full understanding of his tenets. This assumption is found in most critical studies about him.4 From a literary perspective, Galiano’s earliest significant pronouncements took place in 1818 when he aided his friend José Joaquín de Mora, also a liberal, in a dispute with Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber, a German diplomat settled in Cádiz, over the debate between Classicism and Romanticism. Faber was a friend of August Wilhelm Schlegel and a staunch 3

4

Vicente Lloréns, Liberales y románticos and ‘Colaboraciones de emigrados españoles en revistas inglesas (1824-1834)’, Hispanic Review, 19 (1951), 121-42. The only monograph on Galiano’s literary activities of which I am aware is Carlos García Barrón, La obra crítica y literaria de Don Antonio Alcalá Galiano (Madrid: Gredos, 1970).

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political and religious conservative. In the dispute, following Schlegel, he declared the need for a reappraisal of Calderón’s drama against the attacks of Neoclassical writers and critics. But, at the same time, Faber’s defence of the Spanish playwright became a vindication of Spanish traditional values: Catholicism and monarchic, oligarchic, ideals. Galiano spoke in favour of Neoclassicism and what he called ‘French classical taste’. His involvement in the dispute also had a political motivation, as he acknowledges in his biographical work Memorias de un anciano.5 He was then at the peak of his revolutionary politics. Schlegel’s theories were no novelty for Galiano; in the same year, on his way to Stockholm as a diplomatic delegate, he had stopped in London, where he met Madame de Staël, who asked him to carry several volumes of De L’Allemagne to Sweden for her friends there. Galiano felt himself slighted with the charge, and disliked the lady for her conservative ideas about Spanish politics. However, in his last article, he showed a more moderate position and declared, in spite of certain objections, his regard for Calderón’s drama.6 This role of mediator and an aversion to extreme positions would be the essential feature of Galiano’s future ideology, both in politics and in literature. His turning point came during his years in London, which allowed him a close and direct contact with eminent personalities of both political and intellectual circles. Galiano was not as closely linked to Lord Holland as other Spanish exiles, but he was well acquainted with Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and, in the literary sphere, with Robert Southey and John Hookham Frere among others.7 Some of these acquaintances and the respect that his intellectual competence inspired would eventually grant him the recognition he deserved.

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7

Antonio Alcalá Galiano, ‘Memorias de una anciano’, in Obras escogidas de D. Antonio Alcalá Galiano, 2 vols, ed. by D. Jorge Campos (Madrid: Atlas, 1955), I, p. 78. It was published as a pamphlet with the title Los mismos contra los propios ó respuesta al folleto intitulado Pasatiempo Crítico (Barcelona: Don Agustín Roca, Impresor de la Cámara de S. M., 1818). Only Camille Pitollet, La querelle calderonienne de Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber et José Joaquín de Mora, reconstituée d’après les documents originaux (Paris: [n.p.], 1909) eventually managed to get a copy from a German source; but no other copies were found until Guillermo Carnero rescued one from documents at the Faculty of Law of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid and published it: ‘Une contribution a l’histoire des idées esthétiques dans l’Espagne du debut du XIXe s.: Un text inconnu d’Antonio Alcalá Galiano’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 16 (1980), 291-308. Lord Holland’s role as an advocate of the Spanish liberal cause is well-known. See Manuel Moreno Alonso, La forja del liberalismo en España. Los amigos españoles de Lord Holland 1793-1840 (Madrid: Congreso de los Diputados, 1997).

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Alcalá Galiano already admired and was familiar with British literature when he arrived in London. His seven-year residence in England led him to widen his knowledge of the most recent literary productions. His writings from then on reveal a transformation of his literary ideals, and elaborate a political stance with regard to the image of Spanish literature for a British audience, an image very different from the exotic image of Spain that British Romanticism had exploited.8 Something very similar occurs with the image of British culture that he will later project for the Spanish. My aim in this paper is to illustrate the evolution of Galiano’s thought by considering principally the two most relevant works of literary criticism he published in England, his Introductory lecture delivered in the University of London in 15 November 1828, and his five articles on Spanish nineteenth-century literature published in The Athenaeum in 1834 with reference to other important works published after his return to Spain.9 In 1828, the recently founded London University (1826) appointed Alcalá Galiano Professor of Spanish Language and Literature. He unreservedly shared the institution’s liberal ideology: the later London College was the ‘new’ University of the ‘new’ age, opposed to the socially elitist and ideologically discriminatory policies of Oxford and Cambridge. It counted on Jeremy Bentham’s indirect support. Galiano was personally acquainted with him and was a declared Benthamite. Besides, the post relieved his financial problems, since he had rejected the pension granted by the British government to political exiles because it did not support the Spanish cause as he had expected. With this gesture he intended not only to show his dissatisfaction but also to preserve his independence. His Introductory Lecture was published immediately and seems to have been quite favourably received, since it had a second edition the following year.10 In this Lecture Galiano presents an outline of his teaching project. He begins by stating that the Spanish language has no rival in its ‘majestic’ nature, a term that bears many connotations. I share Mª del Carmen Heredia Campos’ interpretation of the Lecture as an overt pronouncement on the

8

9

10

See Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). Antonio Alcalá Galiano, ‘The Literature of the Nineteenth Century. Spain’, The Athenaeum. London Literary and Critical Journal, 338 (April 19, 1834), 290-95; 340 (May 3, 1834), 329-33; 342 (May 17, 1834), 370-74; 344 (May 32, 1834), 411-414; 346 (June 14, 1834), 450-54. For a Spanish translation, see Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Literatura española del siglo XIX, trans. by Vicente Lloréns (Madrid: Alianza, 1969). Antonio Alcalá Galiano, An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London on Saturday, November 15, 1828 (London: John Taylor, 1828, 1829).

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cultural and political place that Spain deserved within the context of modern European nations.11 The next significant move by Galiano is to declare the Latin origin of the Spanish language: The Spanish language is derived from the Latin, or, I may rather say, is Latin itself corrupted, and, according to common parlance, barbarized by the various nations which have succeeded each other as invaders and temporary masters of the Spanish peninsula. A few learned men, prompted no doubt by a desire of saying something novel, have vainly endeavoured to trace the present Castilian to a Gothic origin; going such lengths [sic] as to assert that it is Gothic Latinized, not Latin Gothicized. Against this theory the whole structure of the language evidently deposes.12

Galiano is taking a stand in the debate on the origin of the Spanish language that took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The idea of Spanish as a Gothic, Latinised language had been put forward by Simonde de Sismondi in his influential De la littérature du midi de L’Europe (1813). The Spaniards, as opposed to the Italians, Sismondi held, had managed to maintain the nobility and the chivalric spirit of the Visigoths.13 Against the opinions of foreigners such as Sismondi or Friedrich Bouterwerk (Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, 1804), Alcalá Galiano follows those of reputed Spanish scholars such as Gregorio Mayáns de Siscar (Orígenes de la lengua española, 1737) and Juan Andrés (Dell’Origene, Progressi e statto attuale d’ogni letteratura, 1782-1799), who declared Latin to be the origin and linguistic basis of Spanish.14 Galiano also mentions other linguistic sources: Greek, Hebrew, Phoenician, and Arabic, adding that the influence of the latter has been extremely overvalued. Arabic words, he later affirms, are injurious to the musical beauty of the Spanish language.15

11

12 13

14

15

See Mª del Carmen Heredia Campos, ‘La cultura española y el regeneracionismo liberal. El discurso de Antonio Alcalá Galiano en la Universidad de Londres de 1828’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie V, Historia Contemporánea, 14 (2001), 169-228. I am greatly indebted to Heredia Campos’ pioneering work on Galiano’s Lecture. Alcalá Galiano, 1829, p. 7. Simonde de Sismondi, De la littérature du midi de L’Europe, 4 vols (Paris : Trenttel et Würtz; Strasbourg: Maison de Commerce, 1813), III, p. 111. In one of his Athenaeum essays, Galiano criticises Sismondi’s History, accusing him of ‘ignorance of the language and literature, of which he had ventured to write a history’. ‘Literature of the Nineteenth Century’, 342 (1834), p. 370. It is significant to notice the order that Mayáns y Siscar establishes for the relevance of various languages in the formation of Spanish. He places Latin in first place, followed by Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Gothic, Phoenician, and, finally, Basque. See Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, Orígenes de la lengua española, 2 vols (Madrid: Atlas, 1981, facs.), p. 72.

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When coming to the point of assessing Spanish literature, he refers to two opposed current views in the eighteenth century: either its total disparagement, with Montesquieu at the head, or its belittling. A controversy had arisen when two Italian authors — Tiraboschi in his Storia della letteratura italiana (1770) and Bettinelli in his Del risorgimento d’Italia negli Studii. Nelle Arti e nei costumi dopo il Mille (1775) — had praised Italian literature and accused Spanish literary history of corrupting Latin letters, first after Augustus and later in the seventeenth century. These pronouncements gave way to various responses by Spanish Jesuits exiled in Italy. The most important of them was written by father Serrano and the abbé Lampillas under the title Saggio storico-apologetico della letteratura spagnola (17781801). Galiano refers in the Lecture to Lampillas’s work and objects that it ‘is not calculated to give a correct idea of Spanish literature’, perhaps because of the Jesuit’s strictures against Spanish Neoclassicism for its harsh criticisms of seventeenth-century literature.16 In defence of Spanish literature and in his desire to project an image of Spain as a modern nation, Galiano pronounces himself against the new ‘Romantic’ view: A contrary opinion has been entertained by some, more favourable to the productions of the Spanish intellect, though certainly no less miscalculated. It has been asserted, that in Spanish compositions the Oriental taste is found universally to prevail; that the Spanish writers have followed Arabic models, from which has sprung a wild, Romantic, imaginative style of writing, very unlike that of the rest of Europe, and for this reason, highly interesting. Such is not, however, the exclusive character of the Spanish authors; since in the most correct of them, too close an imitation of the Latin and Italian classics is a fault with which they may be justly taxed.17

It must be noticed at this point that, though admitting the Latin background of the Spanish language, Juan Andrés in his Dell’Origene, Progressi e statto attuale d’ogni letteratura had highlighted the influence of Arabic literature and music on the European tradition since the Middle Ages, and was later followed by others such as Bouterwek and Sismondi, who, lacking the erudition of the Spanish encyclopaedist, had offered a ‘Romanticised’ view of the country. And this is precisely what Galiano rejects. Therefore, he holds, Spanish is a romance, classic, language. Its most ancient literary production is the poem of El Cid, in his opinion, a composition containing hardly any Arabic words. He goes on: the creator of Spanish was Alfonso X, who established Castilian as the official and cultural language of the 16 17

Alcalá Galiano, 1829, p. 17. Alcalá Galiano, 1829, p. 17.

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kingdom. Galiano refers to Alfonso X’s famous Partidas, or Book of Law, a monumental work praised for the beauty of its style, in which, according to him, no significant traces of Arabic influence are found. These two references enhance a particular identity for the Spanish nation: The Cid Campeador had been taken as the emblem of the Castilian victory over the Muslims and the Siete Partidas were the most important Spanish legacy to the history of law. Based on Roman law, they were intended to put an end to the confusion caused by the multiplicity of legal norms extant in Iberian communities, thus reinforcing their political unity. They had come to the forefront of Spanish politics since they had served as the legal basis of the Juntas Gubernativas (local governing committees) during the Peninsular War, and later would be the most important Spanish legal referent for the 1812 Constitution, becoming well-known all over Europe. The beauty of the Spanish language is illustrated with excerpts from Fray Luis de Granada, a follower of the classics; Miguel de Cervantes, the purity of whose ‘Spanishness’ no one would deny; and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, a man of the Enlightenment, and, for Galiano, a reformer of what in his opinion was the extreme Gallophilia of the eighteenth century, which had corrupted the language. It cannot pass unnoticed that Jovellanos was one of Lord Holland’s best Spanish friends. Galiano’s praise is not consistent with his articles in the Athenaeum (1834) or, years later, in his Historia de la literatura española, francesa, inglesa e italiana (1844), where he certainly portrays Jovellanos as one of Spain’s celebrities, considering the man and his works, but not as outstanding in his literary compositions. His unreserved praise in the Lecture was probably due to the high esteem in which Jovellanos was held in British liberal circles. Galiano himself published an encomiastic article on the Spanish writer in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1830.18 Let us have a close look at Alcalá Galiano’s outline of Spanish literature. He begins by echoing Blanco White, stating that the great writers before the sixteenth century are judicious and moderate, not daring and Romantic as common opinion held. He refers to the Book of the Conde Lucanor, the Arcipreste de Hita, Fernando Gómez de Ciudad Real, and Jorge Manrique. The romances of that period are the only exception to this. Of course, he admits that sixteenth-century writers show an Italian influence, but he prefers in this case to highlight their Classicism, mentioning Garcilaso, Herrera, Fray Luis de León, and the brothers Argensola. Nearly twenty years later, in the Historia de la literatura, Galiano seems to have clarified his own stand in relation to Classicism, and distinguishes between the spirit of Roman poetry, 18

Antonio Alcalá Galiano, ‘Jovellanos’, Foreign Quarterly Review, 5 (1829-1830), 547-68.

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that of sixteenth-century Spanish poetry, which he qualifies as ‘Castilian’, referring to Garcilaso, Fray Luis de León and the Argensolas as its best examples, and the Italian Classicism of Tasso and Metastasio.19 As we do not have many references to his regard for Renaissance Spanish writers, this brief comment is of the utmost importance, since it shows that, unlike many other critics, he considers Spanish sixteenth-century poetry not an imitation of the Italian model, but genuinely Spanish. Moreover, he does something that was completely unusual in the contemporary considerations of Spanish literature: he brings to the forefront the reputation of the Spanish humanists Arias Montano, Simón Abril, Antonio de Nebrija, Luis Vives, and Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, among others. In his assessment of Spanish seventeenth-century literature, the most controversial period, Galiano positions himself between the two extremes of the harsh attacks of the Neoclassic school and the panegyrics of the Romantics: The imitations of the Classics and the Italians came at last to an end; and the Spanish writers became more original, though less pure in their taste. Precluded from imparting the vigour of philosophical inquiry, or the energy arising from political contention, to their works, they often lost themselves in puerile refinement, and mistook bombast for elevation; but at the same time trusting more in their natural powers, they were more national, natural, and original in their style of composition.20

The terms ‘national’, ‘natural’, and ‘original’ that appear in this passage are key words in Galiano’s critical literary discourse, all pregnant with more or less direct political implications, obviously with very positive connotations, since they define the literary ideal he will later seek for Spanish literature. The faults he finds in the literature of the period, ‘puerile refinement’ and ‘bombast’, were shared by both Classicists and Romantics. He refers indirectly to the censorship to which these writers were subject as one of the causes of these faults. Later, he will mention the Spanish Inquisition explicitly as the main obstacle to the scientific and philosophic progress of the country in these centuries, as its constrictions led some writers to overdo the form using a bombastic and intricate rhetoric, and to disregard philosophical expression, i.e. ‘thought’, in their compositions.21 19

20 21

Alcalá Galiano, Historia de la literatura española, francesa, inglesa é italiana (Madrid: Imprenta de la Sociedad Literaria y Tipográfica, 1844), p. 452. Alcalá Galiano, 1829, p. 22. Heredia Campos points out the interest in the Spanish Inquisition by British readers, attested by the publication in English of Antonio Puigblanch’s The Inquisition Unmasked (London, 1815), though they were also acquainted with José Antonio Llorente’s Historia de la

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The seventeenth century was the period of the Habsburgs on the Spanish throne, the dynasty glorified by Spanish nineteenth-century reactionaries, supporters of the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. Besides the Inquisition, Galiano also blames Arabic influence for the bombastic style of that time: It is at this time that traces of Oriental taste may be discovered in the compositions of the Spanish poets. That it arose from their being conversant with the Arabic authors, is extremely doubtful [...] but the manners of the people in the South of Spain were Arab-like. A taste for hyperbole and metaphor prevailed among them, partly owing to their ancient connection with the Orientals, partly to the influence of a congenial climate and habits of life [...] From poetry, prose caught the infection, and became animated with superior spirit, but was frequently inflated and conceited.22

Galiano uses the word ‘Oriental’, which, while associated with the attraction of the exotic, at the time also signified backwardness.23 He explicitly equates Orientalism with ‘barbarism’: ‘Spain was plunged in absolute mental darkness. The age of barbarism which I am mentioning is a singular phenomenon in the history of the human mind.’24 It must be noticed, however, that Galiano was aware of the cultural richness that Spain owed to the Arabs, since he makes a passing reference to the ‘treasures of Arabic literature contained within the walls of the Escurial’ which Casiri had brought to light in his Biblioteca Arabico-Hispanica Escurialensis (Madrid, 1760-1770).25 Galiano seems to be replying to contemporary Romantic literary historiography of Spain, particularly Bouterwek, who also held that the Arabic influence was decisive at this period, though the German author sees it in much more favourable terms.26 Alcalá Galiano attempts to forge an image of the Spanish nation and culture radically opposed to the orientalism that contemporary Romanticism had exploited. The Arabic-Oriental inheritance signified the inferiority of Spain in relation to other European countries, and was read as the cause and proof of its backwardness. Denying it was a patriotic pronouncement for a liberal politician such as Galiano, who was fighting for the promotion and

22 23

24 25

26

Inquisición española (París, 1821-1823). Articles on the Spanish Inquisition were also continuously appearing in the British periodicals. Heredia Campos, p. 222. Alcalá Galiano, 1829, pp. 23-24. The classic work by Edward W. Said is always illuminating for an understanding of this interpretation. See Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). Alcalá Galiano, 1829, p. 25. Juan Andrés based on this monumental edition his thesis of the influence of Arabic literature and music on the European tradition. Friedrich Bouterwek, History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, 2 vols, trans. by Thomasina Ross (London: Boosey and Sons, 1823), I, pp. 606-07.

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progress of his country. José Luis Abellán has argued that the idea of the nation (conceptually based on the idea of the Volksgeist) was the ground upon which Spanish Romanticism, or, according to him, liberalism, based the political and economic reform of the country, whereas the Enlightenment would have relied upon reason for this achievement. He thinks that this equation of nationalism and progress was the greatest Spanish contribution to European cultural thought of the time.27 However, he hardly considers Galiano’s important role in its dissemination, to which his Lecture and other publications in England clearly attest. Galiano’s image of Spanish literature in the Lecture renders Spanish culture as exclusively descending from the Graeco-Roman tradition, and meets the needs of the rising nationalism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois.28 In the canon of the seventeenth century, Galiano highlights the figures of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, the picaresque, and Calderón. Galiano’s new aesthetic stand is openly revealed when he admits his regard for Calderón’s drama. He shares it with the critics of a ‘highly Enlightened nation,’ (Germany) though not so completely and unreservedly.29 If we consider Galiano’s admiration for Shakespeare, it seems difficult to assume that his reservations in the case of Calderón were due merely to literary reasons. A. W. Schlegel’s and Böhl von Faber’s appraisal of the Spanish playwright as the embodiment of traditionalist and absolutist politics may have weighed rather heavily upon Galiano’s liberalism. A similar political interpretation can be made of his explanation of the causes that, according to him, had degraded Spanish literature: the power of the Inquisition under the Habsburgs and the Oriental influence. It may be relevant to refer here to an article Galiano published several years later under the title ‘Reflexiones sobre la influencia del espíritu caballeresco de la Edad Media en la civilización europea’, where he praises chivalric ideals for putting an end to feudalism and fostering the unity of the great European nations in the sixteenth century. In Spain, this unity was combined with a mixed system in which the centralization of the state coexisted with regional law-codes which the Habsburgs, a foreign dynasty, seriously undermined. The Spaniards of the time could manifest the patriotic sentiment of a liberal 27

28 29

José Luis Abellán, Liberalismo y Romanticismo (1808-1874), Historia Crítica del Pensamiento Español, 7 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1984), IV. Heredia Campos, p. 219. He will repeat the same valuation of the Spanish playwright in his essay ‘Del estado de las doctrinas críticas en España en lo relativo a la composición poética’, originally published in the Revista científica y literaria, I, (1844), 241-255, and also in his Historia de la literatura (1844), pp. 23-24.

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Spain oppressed by the dark power of despotism.30 Moreover, civil and military law codes based on natural law and, in Galiano’s words, aimed at the happiness of the people were also derived from chivalric ideals.31 The term ‘happiness’ seems rather out of place in traditional legal discourse, recalling instead the theories of Adam Smith to which Galiano had strongly adhered from an early time, thanks to the influence of his uncle Vicente Alcalá Galiano.32 This sociological bent of his political and literary ideas acquired a greater import after a more thorough study of these theories during his residence in England. Within the context of the Lecture, it is inferred that the Habsburgs had put an end to this ideal of general happiness. Galiano moves next to the eighteenth century, remarking that this situation was somehow ameliorated thanks to the Bourbon dynasty, which tempered Inquisitorial censorship. But the French influence caused a deadly effect upon Spanish writers, whose works are reckoned by Galiano as ‘tame, spiritless, and stiff’.33 The regeneration begins with figures of the Enlightenment such as Feijóo and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, on whom he projects many of his own ideals. He avoids comments on contemporary writers, with a passing remark about their involvement in politics, implicitly acknowledging the awkwardness of his position, and promising to deal with the subject at length without any political prejudices in his lectures at the University. But a few years later, in 1834, British readers would have the opportunity to learn Galiano’s ideas about his contemporaries in a series of articles published in The Athenaeum. He concludes this Lecture with a declaration of his commitment to utilitarian and bourgeois principles characteristic of British liberalism. He speaks of the ‘utility’ of the studies he is in charge of — he has previously stressed the possibilities that knowledge of the Spanish language would open for British investments in South America: By means of that study [foreign literature], not only are prejudices dispelled, but strong affections are created. Nations not only cease to hate, but begin to esteem and love each other. Thereby commerce, the greatest blessing of social man, is promoted; and war, his bitterest enemy, is in equal proportion discouraged.34 30

31

32 33 34

See Raquel Sánchez García, Alcalá Galiano y el liberalismo español (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2005), p. 42. Antonio Alcalá Galiano, ‘Reflexiones sobre la influencia del espíritu caballeresco de la Edad Media en la civilización europea’, Revista científica y literaria, vol I (Madrid: Imprenta de José María Ducazcal, 1847), pp. 193-202 and 267-279 (p. 272). Sánchez García, p. 60. Alcalá Galiano, 1829, p. 26. Ibid., p.30.

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He also proclaims that the exchange of literary productions is becoming as free and vital as the trade of manufactures, praising London University (‘it bears the modest garb and business-like aspect of a joint-stock company’) for its independence and zeal in promoting a liberal education: ‘Thus literature acts upon politics and morals, and it is in its turn reacted upon by them.’35 Galiano skilfully merges both the ‘economic’ (British) and the ‘nationalistic’ (Spanish) versions of liberal thought, offering the best possible image of Spanish culture and literature within the background of his political ideals. The five articles in The Athenaeum appeared in 1834 between April and June, and they are a first-rate document on early nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The Athenaeum was the most prestigious literary weekly paper of Victorian England, founded in 1828, and was much involved in liberal politics. It boasted several members of the Cambridge Apostles among its contributors: Tennyson, Sterling, Maurice, Trench, and Kemble. The articles on Spanish literature are part of a program to publish studies on contemporary foreign literature (France, Persia, Spain, Poland, Germany, United States), starting with Spain. This privileged position within the series had a political explanation. The end of Absolutism after the death of Ferdinand VII and the restoration of a constitutional monarchy had renewed interest in Spain. Among the possible choices for Spanish contributors there was, of course, Blanco White, the most famous Spanish writer in English, but he was too involved in religious controversies at the time. There remained Alcalá Galiano, in France by then, who was entrusted the task by Charles W. Dilke, then editor of the journal. It is important to notice that he wrote these articles practically at the same time as the ‘Preface’ to Saavedra’s El moro expósito. The simultaneous composition of both pieces should always be taken into account. In The Athenaeum, Galiano deals with about 60 writers, many of whom would be practically unknown had it not been for this study, as Lloréns rightly remarks.36 I would like to highlight Galiano’s historical view of literature in these essays, always considering it in relation to its political background, probably his most important contribution to Spanish literary historiography. The Habsburgs are once more criticised for the deadly effect of their despotism and oppressive politics upon literature, since they left no ground for its cultivation. The metaphor of cultivation, insistently repeated in his writings, underlines the relevance of the national element in his literary views. In the Historia de la literatura, he highlights the importance of a 35 36

Ibid., pp. 31-32. Alcalá Galiano, 1969, p. 11.

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country’s climate. He states that he does not go to such lengths as Montesquieu regarding its influence upon legislation; however, he has no doubts about its impact upon physical elements, and these upon ideas.37 Only the picaresque, drama, and romances, he states, were original Spanish productions. He will constantly repeat the words ‘natural’ and ‘original’ as the requirements for genuine literary creations. Raquel Sánchez García argues that it was from Hugh Blair that Galiano learnt to value what was natural and native in literature and, by inference, in politics.38 I want also to call attention to Alcalá Galiano’s discourse when dealing here with the dispute in Spain between Classicists and Romantics. He mentions the protagonists: Böhl von Faber and Mora, and refers to himself as one of Mora’s friends, without revealing his identity, who, he adds, has later changed his mind, not to side with the Romantics, but to follow the most ‘liberal’ and just ideas of English poets and critics. The possibility of a reformation of Spanish literature came for Galiano with the publication of Rivas’s El moro expósito in Paris in 1834, traditionally considered the birth of Spanish Romanticism. The ‘Preface’ has been interpreted as Galiano’s most radically Romantic pronouncement, and counterposed to his so-called later ‘eclecticism’. However, a close look at the text of the ‘Preface’ reveals that he was already against the confrontation between Classicism and Romanticism. He declares that the author of the composition ‘has not intended to make it either “Classic” or “Romantic”, both arbitrary divisions in which he does not believe’ (‘No ha pretendido hacerlo clásico ni romántico, divisiones arbitrarias en cuya existencia no cree’).39 This is precisely his perception of British Romanticism, completely alien to the controversy, as he explicitly states: Inglaterra no consiente, ni casi conoce, la división de los poetas en clásicos y románticos [...] Desde Cowper hasta el día presente, quizá es la poesía británica la más rica entre las modernas, así por la abundancia como por el valor de sus producciones, precisamente porque, abandonando los autores reglas erróneas, y no cuidándose de ser clásicos ni románticos, han venido a ser lo que eran los clásicos antiguos en sus días y lo que deben ser en todos los tiempos los poetas [...] en cuyas obras hay estro y buen gusto, al mismo tiempo que originalidad y variedad extremas.40 (England does not allow and hardly knows about the distinction between Classicism and Romanticism [...] From the times of Cowper to the present, the British is perhaps the richest 37 38 39

40

Alcalá Galiano, 1844, p. 18. Sánchez García, p. 80. Duque de Rivas, El moro expósito o Córdoba y Burgos en el siglo décimo, 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa, 1982), I, p. 28. Ibid., p. 24. My translation throughout.

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of all modern poetry both for the amount and the quality of its productions, precisely because the writers, leaving aside mistaken rules and not caring to be either Classicists or Romantics, have become what the classics were in their own times, and what poets must be in all times [...] in whose works there is found inspiration and good taste, together with extreme originality and variety.)

Vicente Lloréns, in the ‘Preface’ to the Spanish edition of Galiano’s articles in The Athenaeum, has rightly pointed out that the British writers shared this perception of themselves, taking the Classicism / Romanticism controversy as a Continental debate.41 This is obviously a terminological issue, but, for Galiano, it implied great significance. Against the general opinion of literary historians and critics, my contention is that Alcalá Galiano, instead of taming his Romanticism, became more genuinely Romantic in his later days.42 In the last of his essays for The Athenaeum, very close to the end, he commends British contemporary (Romantic) literature as the model for Spanish writers: The poets of Spain ought to take a wider range than they have hitherto occupied: they should avoid, however, imitating the extravagancies of the writers of the modern Romantic school whose good qualities are disfigured by an excess of affectation; disregarding the shadowy distinction between Classicism and Romanticism, they should follow the bright and judicious examples of the illustrious poets of the later days of Britain.43

In 1844, Galiano stated: ‘El Romanticismo español, bien entendido, debería ser en la esencia como en el nombre clasicismo’ (Spanish Romanticism properly understood should be both in its essence and its denomination Classicism). And he later explains: ‘la verdadera escuela clásica es la que toma ciertos principios de belleza, y luego hace en ellos variaciones y los adapta a las costumbres, a la historia así política como literaria, y al gusto de la nación’ (the true Classic school adopts certain principles of beauty, and then transforms and adapts them to the customs, to the political and literary history, and to the taste of a nation). 44 According to him, Greece rather than Rome is the great model because its literature had simplicity, spontaneity, and true beauty. The bombastic version of Romanticism had failed in Spain

41 42

43 44

Alcalá Galiano, 1969, p. 12. Edgar Allison Peers in his comment on the Introductory Lecture at London University remarks ‘At heart he was probably always a pseudo-classic’: ‘The First English Professor of Spanish: Antonio Alcalá Galiano’ in Estudios hispánicos. Homenaje a Archer M. Huntington (Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley College, 1952), pp. 491-97 (p. 497). Alcalá Galiano, 1834, p. 453. Alcalá Galiano, ‘Del estado’, 1844, p. 250.

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because it was imported from France. The melancholic version was not natural to the Spanish soil either, but native to northern countries.45 In 1860, Galiano published in the periodical Crónica de ambos mundos an article on Macaulay’s History of England where he dedicates several pages to complain about the scarcity of translations into Spanish from English literature, and the general lack of knowledge of its authors, mentioning Shakespeare, Milton, Southey, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell as great British writers unknown to most Spaniards, let alone Macaulay, to whom he dedicates his paper.46 In 1862, he published another article with the title ‘De la influencia de Lord Byron en la literatura contemporánea’ in which he gives a more detailed explanation of how injurious French Romanticism had been to Spanish literature. The cause lay in the poor imitation that the French had made of Byron’s poetry and their disregard of figures of the same import such as Southey, Moore, Campbell, Coleridge, Crabbe, and others. Spanish writers, guided by Espronceda, were again dominated by French taste, and produced compositions completely alien to native tradition and the national character. The exception was the Duke of Rivas, who had a more solid formation and a critical judgement derived from his acquaintance with British critics and from the study, above all, of the old Castilian poets, particularly of what in them is more ‘original’ and ‘spontaneous’, the plays and the romances. If there were traces of the satanic in his poetry, it was generally ‘reflejo del cielo bajo el cual había nacido y criádose el poeta, hija de la atmósfera templada y serena que había respirado, retrato del natural alegre y festivo del personaje que la producía’ (a reflection of the sky under which the poet had been born and bred, a child of the temperate and serene climate in which he had dwelt, a portrait of the cheerful and lively character of the person who produced it).47 As late as 1861, Galiano read a lecture at the Real Academia Española on the learning of foreign languages, Que el estudio profundo y detenido de las lenguas extranjeras, lejos de contribuir al deterioro de la propia sirve para conocerla y manejarla con más acierto. It vindicates the learning of the English language instead of the more fashionable French, which had been the target of many controversies owing to the flood of Gallicisms into Spanish. Thus Galiano’s title, which argues that given their different origins, English would never be so harmful as the French. But he goes beyond the language 45 46

47

Ibid., p. 251 and 254. Antonio Alcalá Galiano, ‘Del célebre escritor inglés Lord Macaulay y de su historia de Inglaterra’, Crónica de ambos mundos (Madrid, 1860), I, 199-202 (p. 201). Antonio Alcalá Galiano, ‘De la influencia de Lord Byron en la literatura contemporánea’, La América. Crónica hispano-americana, 8 February 1862, 1-24 (p. 4).

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itself to wonder ‘¿no es posible caer en cuenta que es posible tratar nosotros a la castellana materias que tratan a la inglesa los ingleses?’ (is it not possible for us to realize that it is possible for us to deal in the Castilian way with matters dealt with in the English way by the English?).48 These passages reveal that Galiano’s treatment of the Classicism/ Romanticism debate contains the core of his idea of a national, original literature. If we look again at the 1834 Athenaeum essays, we also find the Bourbons accused of erasing all traces of a national literature and leaving no space for imaginative compositions. Spanish writing became with them mere copies of French Neoclassical models.49 Galiano remarks that though promising, the reformation undertaken by figures like Jovellanos, Cadalso, and Meléndez Valdés, which combined native tradition with the French school (Classicism), was paralysed by the latter’s attempt to create a poetic language. Galiano’s words on this subject must have sounded familiar to British readers because he transfers Wordsworth’s complaints in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads regarding poetic diction to the Spanish context. Meléndez, he writes, ‘did not scruple (when it suited his purpose) to use French and Italian idioms, and to coin new, and, for the most part, highsounding epithets.’50 Galiano refers to the controversy in England. He admits that words not proper for prose have a place in Spanish poetic compositions, although, he adds, a complete rejection of a natural language in favour of a conventional jargon can lead to other kinds of faults. This idea is repeated in similar terms in the ‘Preface’ to El moro expósito, and in his Historia de la literatura, where he compares Gray’s artificial poetic diction with the Spanish sixteenth-century poet Fernando de Herrera ‘encubriendo con elegantes frases o perífrasis pobres pensamientos’ (concealing with elegant phrases or periphrasis poor thoughts).51 In the Athenaeum essays he does not specify the kind of diction he commends for Spanish poetry, but in the Historia de la literatura he will praise William 48

49

50 51

Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Que el estudio profundo y detenido de las lenguas extranjeras, lejos de contribuir al deterioro de la propia sirve para conocerla y manejarla con más acierto (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1861), p. 22. As regards the French imposition, Galiano establishes the equation between the political and literary spheres in the article ‘Literatura’ (1838) in which he reviews Spanish drama and complains of its slavishness to French models since the Bourbon dynasty came to power, which put an end to the great Spanish comedy; first the Classicist school and later the Romantic disfigured Spanish drama, whereas in England contemporary tragedy is a continuation of its native tradition: Revista de Madrid (Madrid: Oficina de Don Tomás Jordán, 1838), I, pp. 41-55. Alcalá Galiano, The Athenaeum (342), p. 370. Alcalá Galiano, Historia de la literatura, 1844, p. 106.

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Cowper for using ‘true English,’ the very language of the middle classes, where, he writes, is found the ‘genuine’ character of each nation: ‘habló un verdadero inglés, y muy de la clase media, en la cual se encuentra peculiarmente el verdadero carácter de cada pueblo’ (he spoke a true English, absolutely belonging to middle class speech, where the genuine character of each nation is peculiarly found).52 This is a noticeable political move from Wordsworth’s language of low and rustic people. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the British industrial revolution is replaced with the Ancien Régime to which Spain was yet subject, and, therefore, all the impulse for the regeneration of the country was to come from a middle class that was practically non-existent at the time. Significantly, at the end of the last lecture, Galiano complains about the poor education of the Spanish nobility, implicitly accusing them of the cultural backwardness of the country. He attributes the state of Spanish literature to social and commercial reasons: the restrictions in the production and sale of literature, and the lack of a demand from readers; in Spain, he states, there is no readership. The conditions for a book trade, a flourishing activity in Britain at those times, were completely lacking in the Peninsula. Thus, he makes literary progress and economic progress mutually dependent upon one another, and both, of course, on the creation of an enterprising middle class. Raquel Sánchez García has studied the evolution of Alcalá Galiano’s political thought from his initial Jacobinism towards a more realistic view of politics during his exile in England. She remarks that this shift will later lead him to a sociological conception of the Constitution. The whole political system should be grounded upon a stable and ample middle class.53 These ideas are expounded in his Lecciones de derecho político (read at the Ateneo of Madrid between 1843 and 1844), where he contends that ‘en un siglo mercantil y literario como el presente es preciso que las clases medias dominen, porque en ellas reside la fuerza material, y no corta parte de la moral, y donde reside la fuerza está con ella el poder social, y allí debe existir también el poder político’ (in a trading and literary century such as the present one, dominance by the middle classes is required because material power, and no small part of moral force, lies in them, and where power lies, there lies social power too, and there political power must be).54 And he

52 53 54

Ibid., p. 392. Ibid., p. 154. Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Lecciones de derecho político (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1984), p. 40.

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commends the British model as opposed to the French because it contains the necessary ingredient that has allowed stability: flexibility.55 The last words quoted from Galiano prove once again what I have been discussing so far: his literary program cannot be fully understood without his political program. Within the general framework of his nationalism and liberalism, Galiano transforms the concepts of tradition and innovation to rewrite the reception of both Spanish and British literatures and cultures in the Romantic period and break with clichés.

Bibliography Abellán, José Luis, Liberalismo y Romanticismo (1808-1874), Historia Crítica del Pensamiento Español, 7 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1984) Alcalá Galiano, Antonio, Los mismos contra los propios ó respuesta al folleto intitulado Pasatiempo Crítico (Barcelona: Don Agustín Roca, Impresor de la Cámara de S.M., 1818) ——, An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London on Saturday, November 15, 1828 (London: John Taylor, 1828, 1829) ——, ‘The Literature of the Nineteenth Century. Spain’, The Athenaeum. London Literary and Critical Journal, 338 (April 19 1834), 290-95; 340 (May 3 1834), 329-33; 342 (May 17 1834), 370-74; 344 (May 32 1834), 411-414; 346 (June 14 1834), 450-54. ——, ‘Literature’, Revista de Madrid, vol I (Madrid: Oficina de Don Tomás Jordán, 1838), pp. 41-55. ——, ‘Del estado de las doctrinas críticas en España en lo relativo a la composición poética’, Revista científica y literaria, I (1844), 241-255. ——, Historia de la literatura española, francesa, inglesa é italiana (Madrid: Imprenta de la Sociedad Literaria y Tipográfica, 1845) ——, ‘Reflexiones sobre la influencia del espíritu caballeresco de la Edad Media en la civilización europea’, Revista científica y literaria, vol I (Madrid: Imprenta de José María Ducazcal, 1847), pp. 193-202 and 267279. ——, ‘Del célebre escritor inglés Lord Macaulay y de su historia de Inglaterra’, Crónica de ambos mundos, I (1860), 199-202.

55

Sánchez García, p. 280.

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——, Que el estudio profundo y detenido de las lenguas extranjeras, lejos de contribuir al deterioro de la propia sirve para conocerla y manejarla con más acierto (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1861) ——, ‘De la influencia de Lord Byron en la literatura contemporánea’, La América. Crónica hispano-americana, 8 de febrero de 1862. ——, Literatura española del siglo XIX, trans. by Vicente Lloréns (Madrid: Alianza, 1969) ——, Lecciones de derecho político (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1984) Bouterwek, Friedrich, History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, trans. by Thomasina Ross, 2 vols (London: Boosey and Sons, 1823) Carnero, Guillermo, ‘Une contribution a l’histoire des idees esthetiques dans l’Espagne du debut du XIXe s.: Un text inconnu d’Antonio Alcalá Galiano’, Melanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 16 (1980), 291-308. García Barrón, Carlos, La obra crítica y literaria de Don Antonio Alcalá Galiano (Madrid: Gredos, 1970). Heredia Campos, Mª del Carmen, ‘La cultura española y el regeneracionismo liberal. El discurso de Antonio Alcalá Galiano en la Universidad de Londres de 1828’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma: Serie V, Historia Contemporánea, 14 (2001), 169-228. Lloréns, Vicente, ‘Colaboraciones de emigrados españoles en revistas inglesas (1824-1834)’, Hispanic Review, 19 (1951), 121-42. ——, Liberales y románticos. Una emigración española en Inglaterra (1823-1834), 2nd edn (Madrid: Castalia, 1968) Mayáns y Siscar, Gregorio, Orígenes de la lengua española, 2 vols (Madrid: Atlas, 1981, facs.) Moreno Alonso, Manuel, La forja del liberalismo en España. Los amigos españoles de Lord Holland 1793-1840 (Madrid: Congreso de los Diputados, 1997) Peers, Edgar Allison, ‘The First English Professor of Spanish: Antonio Alcalá Galiano’ in Estudios hispánicos. Homenaje a Archer M. Huntington (Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley College, 1952), pp. 491-97. Pitollet, Camille, La querelle calderonienne de Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber et José Joaquín de Mora, reconstituée d’après les documents originaux (Paris: [n.p.], 1909) Rivas, Duque de, El moro expósito o Córdoba y Burgos en el siglo décimo, 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa, 1982). Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003) Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)

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Sánchez García, Raquel, Alcalá Galiano y el liberalismo español (Madrid: Centro de estudios políticos y constitucionales, 2005) Sismodi, Simonde de, De la littérature du midi de L’Europe, 4 vols (Paris : Trenttel et Würtz ; Strasbourg : Maison de Commerce, 1813)

Jeffrey Cass

Fighting Over the Woman’s Body: Representations of Spain and the Staging of Gender For many British women writers during the Romantic period, Spain is an irresistible imaginary from which to interrogate their recurring ambivalences to British society and culture. It is a zone in which women simultaneously are subjects and objects of imperial desire. However, this space is not hegemonic; it is contested, cleverly enabling the representation of powerful women who influence the construction of countervailing social and cultural ideologies, as well as subtly shaping the contours of public opinion and discourse regarding the everyday rights and privileges of women. More importantly, the use of the Spanish imaginary by women writers occasionally threatens the triumphalist ethos of nationalism that seeks to stave off feminist critiques of the subaltern status of women within the culture. Not surprisingly, then, the site of contestation is often the woman’s body and control of its disposition.

In a recent essay, Diego Saglia suggests that the representation of Spain on the stage becomes the vehicle for an interrogation of British politics. ‘The idea of Spain,’ Saglia writes, is incarnated as a ‘theater of war’.1 Historical events and regimes affecting Spain — the reign of Ferdinand VII, the Courts of Cadiz, the Convention of Cintra, and the Congress of Vienna — enact a projection and a translation (translatio) of British concerns and fears, analogies of British imperial interests. The British tragedies of the period ‘rework Spain as a cultural geography based on gaps and breaks — between fathers and sons or siblings, rulers and the people, “liberal” and autocratic regimes, East and West, Christianity and Islam, or civilizations and barbarism. In addition, they rework such materials within identifiable ideological agendas, so that the specificity of the Spanish cultural geography interacts with the present of the audience’.2 Coupled with important intertexts such as Schiller’s Die Räuber and Coleridge’s early Osorio, which Coleridge cannibalizes for dramatic material, Coleridge’s Remorse becomes for Saglia the principal text illustrating the theatrical use of the translatio — the political significance of Spanish figuration on the British stage. Saglia’s notion has particular relevance for the problem of gender and its relationship to the ‘theater of war’ in Spanish representations by women writers. Subtly,

1

2

Diego Saglia, ‘Spanish Stages: British Romantic Politics and the Theatrical Politics of Spain, 1808-1823’, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), p.19. Saglia, ‘Spanish Stages’, p. 28.

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these women perform a double analogy with their reification of ‘Spanish cultural geography,’ first by tapping into the national obsession with the politics of war, as do their male counterparts, and second by tying the subaltern status of women to their own private wars against gender inequity. They recognize, intimately and concretely, how women are frequently pawns within the martial landscape of intercultural exchange.3 Intermittently, however, they are also free agents, and it is not coincidental that the rhetoric and language of war dominate the dramatic work of women writers for their own social ends, as we shall see in the comedy of Hannah Cowley’s Bold Stroke for a Husband or in the tragedy of Felicia Hemans’ The Siege of Valencia and Sophia Lee’s Almeyda: Queen of Granada. Outlining a repository of Spanish representations — ‘tales, images, and icons’ — of the ‘Spanish imaginary’ and following the theoretical arcs of Said, Foucault, and Bhabha, Saglia conceives this ‘imaginary’ as a literary zone that British writers inhabit to create ‘fictions about Spain’ that ‘negotiate […] ideas about the nation, established religion and the church, reform and conservatism, the family, the woman question, and forms of masculine or feminine subjectivity’.4 For Saglia, ‘Spain’ produces rich regimes of representation precisely because it was for hundreds of years a frontier where Christianity touched Islam (and Judaism), where Occident melded with Orient. As we have learned from postcolonial critiques of Saidian Orientalism, however, representations of the Other are not unidirectional; rather, they are often ‘fractured,’ to use Saglia’s word, and ambivalent about their origins. In the case of the ‘Spanish imaginary,’ the cultural geography it evokes ‘stabilizes knowledge about this place whilst it is also internally haunted by the incompleteness and multiplicity of such knowledge’.5 The ‘Spanish imaginary’ is thus not singular but multiple; it houses contradictory modes of representation, even as individual works within British Romanticism draw upon this wellspring of Spanish figurations in order to affirm ‘Spain’ as a metonymic index of a particular ideology or sentiment. For male and female writers, then, Spain is both a real and imaginary place where conventionally dominant Western paradigms faltered and ‘when European territories were incorporated into Muslim empires, rather than the

3

4 5

Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). Saglia, Poetic Castles, p. 60. Ibid., p. 61.

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other way around’.6 Though writing specifically about Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir, in its own right a fertile figuration of Spain, Alan Richardson is right to note that the Iberian Peninsula was a battlefield of incursions and counterincursions, a borderland of contending empires. For many British women dramatists during the Romantic period, Spain is thus an irresistible imaginary from which to interrogate their recurring ambivalences to British society and culture. It is a zone in which women simultaneously are subjects and objects of imperial desire. Interestingly, however, this space is not hegemonic; it is a contested terrain, where powerful women influence the construction of countervailing social and cultural ideologies. They subtly shape the contours of public opinion and discourse regarding the rights and privileges that women wish to protect. Moreover, the use of the Spanish imaginary by women writers occasionally threatens the triumphalist and patriarchal ethos of nationalism that seeks to stave off feminist critiques of the subaltern status of women within the culture. Not surprisingly, the site of contestation is often the woman’s body, usually through marriage, with control of its disposition being pivotal for the good of the nation. Even when ‘Spain’ appears little more than scaffolding for comedic effect, the female dramatist stages a politics of gender through rhetorics of war that her heroine uses to advance her stratagems and plots. In Hannah Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband, the notion of the woman warrior’s ‘bold stroke’ frames the narrative: ‘Follow the active, not the formal part, | And snatch a grace beyond the rules of art. Bold Strokes, from bounding genius firmly struck, | Attracts success, more than the turns of luck’.7 Framed by martial rhetoric, the gamesmanship of marriage requires ‘one bold stroke of nature’ which ‘the female pen’ must evoke in order for men to ‘see what female sense can do’.8 In addition, the ‘Prologue’ reaches out to the audience in order for them to applaud female stratagems, which will effectively ‘ratify the peace’ (l.46) Making a ‘bold stroke’ for Julio, the man she loves, Olivia must artfully reject potential suitors such as Garcia and Vincentio, while at the same time assisting Victoria, who wishes to save her marriage and the livelihood for her children. Victoria actually impersonates a man to tempt her 6

7

8

Alan Richardson, ‘Epic Ambivalence: Imperial Politics and Romantic Deflection in Williams’s Peru and Landor’s Gebir’, in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 17801834, ed. by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 274. Hannah Cowley, A Bold Stroke For a Husband in The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), ‘Prologue’, l. 4-7. All references to Cowley’s play will list act, scene, and line(s). Cowley, ‘Prologue’, l. 36-39.

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husband’s mistress, Laura, away from selling land that her husband has foolishly signed over to her. In both cases, a woman must act strategically, defending herself against assault, figuratively and literally. Olivia’s father, Don Caesar, who is tired of his daughter’s recalcitrance at accepting a suitable (or any) suitor, cries: ‘How many have laid siege to her! But that humour of hers, like the works of Gibraltar, no Spaniard can find pregnable’.9 The image of the woman as fortress is, of course, ambiguous since it hints at once at military impregnability and a woman’s pregnability, a breaching of her sexual boundaries by physical, political, or sociocultural force and an indication of her intense vulnerability. Olivia confirms this image when speaking with her maid Minette. She humorously explains how she had fended off General Antonio, who ‘would have made a property of [her],’ by professing an immoderate passion for kittens, knowing how he had an ‘antipathy to cats’.10 And while it is true, as Cox and Gamer have noted, that transforming Olivia into a ‘property’ is Cowley’s way of cleverly pointing to the period notion of women as property in marriage or, in their words, ‘the entrepreneurial attitudes with which most men approached marriage’, it is equally true that property acquisition through marriage and territorial acquisition through military or imperial conquest look very much alike, so much so that the woman’s body becomes textual territory upon which men inscribe their colonizing ambitions.11 Marjean Purinton outlines a geo-criticism in which Cowley uses Spain to stage critiques of contemporary politics of Britain and of Spain, an approach that facilitates examination of transnational politics and colonialism of the past and of the late eighteenth century’.12 Borrowing from Susan Wolfson’s notion of ‘ideological cross dressing,’ J.D. Lopez has additionally argued that Cowley’s play ‘dislocates’ the Spanish male, a polemical opening used by British women dramatists of the period ‘to portray increasingly powerful women within the Spanish setting; whatever is offensive to patriarchal pride can slip in under the comforting cover of jingoism’.13 To stage her critique, 9 10 11 12

13

Cowley, Bold Stroke, I. ii. 77-80. Ibid., 288. Cowley, Bold Stroke, p. 10, n. 7. Marjean Purinton, ‘Abstract: ‘On Teaching A Bold Stroke for a Husband And Other Comedies by Romantic Women Playwrights’, Conference Program for British Women Playwrights, 1780-1830 (2005) (pp.12-13) J.D. Lopez, ‘Abstract: ‘Cowley’s Bold Stroke for a Husband and the Cross-Gendered Spanish Setting’, Conference Program for British Women Playwrights, 1780-1830 (Chapman University, March 12, 2005) (pp.10-11)

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Cowley bolsters her cause of gender equity by emasculating men within the Spanish imaginary. It is a subtle strategy for luring her audience into productive discussion of contentious social and cultural problems without threatening them with Olivia’s ‘shrewish’ behavior as a commentary on their ideological beliefs. And Cowley deliberately alludes to Taming of the Shrew early on in A Bold Stroke for a Husband in order to differentiate Olivia’s behavior from Catherine’s, to suggest that Olivia’s shrewishness is the result of craft and design and not character flaw. For Cowley, any notion of equity depends on this strategic capacity, and her characters employ military language to perform what William Jewett has called the ‘rhetoric of agency.’14 Theoretical ideas of agency may also be why Cowley, much like Joanna Baillie, makes several references to the government of passion — both in terms of knowing when to control it and when to turn it loose. That is the kind of emotional power Inis describes to Minette about Olivia’s plans: ‘If making a husband afraid is the way to keep him faithful, I believe your lady [Olivia] will be the happiest wife in Spain’. (I. iii. 23-25, Cowley’s italics) To be sure, Olivia does hint that she can be compliant, once her desire for Julio is met. Alone on stage, she proclaims: ‘Hah! My poor father, your anxieties will never end ’till you bring Don Julio: — Command me to sacrifice my petulance, my liberty to him, and Iphigenia herself could not be more obedient’. (II. iii. 223-226, Cowley’s italics) Her allusion to the Iphigenia myth is dark since Iphigenia’s body literally serves as a sacrifice to the gods for a favorable wind so that the Greeks, led by her father Agamemnon, could voyage to Troy and engage in the Trojan War. Moreover, because Iphigenia never really agrees to her own death, Olivia’s use of Iphigenia is hyperbolic, undermining her stated intent of complete subservience to Julio. Agamemnon deprives Iphigenia of her free will, something we cannot imagine Olivia permitting her own father to do. Still, any commitment to someone like Julio requires some kind of voluntary submission, which she would perform as part of the social and political norms embedded in Spanish culture. But when her father suggests 14

It may be that Cowley intended her martial representations to ‘compel’ her audience to act (or at least or her characters to act), but William Jewett is surely right when he alleges the murkiness of rhetoric and the ‘unanticipated’ outcomes — some sinister, some not — it may engender. See Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). In the introduction to his book, Jewett writes: ‘My argument isolates a line of Romanticism that might be called ‘paratheoretical’ in its focus on what compels people to adopt theories that compel them to act. “Romantic” appears in my title less as a blanket term for a period than as a name for the inclination within that period to probe the shadowy regions of moral life where discursive accounts of agency begin to work unanticipated effects’. p. 2.

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imprisonment within a convent for her refusal to take any husband and alleviate his social embarrassment and fiscal responsibility, she exclaims: ‘Immur’d in a convent! Then I’ll raise sedition in the sisterhood, depose the abbess, and turn the confessor’s chair to a go-cart’. (II. ii. 109-111) Whether by accepting herself as the necessary sacrifice for peace or committing seditious violence as an act of political theater, agency for Olivia is ironically and profoundly implicated in the control and application of passions. Indeed, for both men and women, these are inextricably linked to the rhetoric of war and government. That her father, Don Caesar, might actually marry Marcella and force Olivia from her rightful social perch, draws Olivia into pitched battle. She construes his plans as an attack and vows a response: ‘Ah, no matter how they begin it. Let them amuse themselves raising batteries; my reserv’d fire shall tumble them about their ears, in the moment my poor father is singing his Io’s for victory’. (IV. ii. 38-41) And her ‘reserv’d fire’ is the ‘bold stroke’ that conquers Julio. Don Carlos’ mistress, Laura, also employs the rhetoric of battle when she discovers that Victoria has duped her into tearing up the deed to his lands, which would make Laura wealthy. Though Victoria apologizes for her deception, justifying it by defending her need to provide for her children though also declaring that she will not ‘desert’ her sister in need, a raging Laura fumes nonetheless: ‘Revenge is sweeter to my heart than love; and if there is a law in Spain to gratify that passion, your virtue shall have another field for exercise’. (V. ii. 160; 171-174) And while the play ends happily, with Victoria and Carlos reconciled and Olivia and Julio engaged, Laura is still plotting against them, biding her time for ‘revenge.’ Uneasily perhaps, Cowley leaves this issue of female war games (‘exercise’) unresolved, with Laura challenging Victoria once again on the battlefield of love (and property). Finally, war and government sometimes merge. Don Vincentio, for example, cynically suggests that some men pursue political power as a ‘hobby horse’. (II. iii. 34) He explains that some men drive their ‘hobby horse’ to Parliament, ‘where | it jerks him sometimes on one side, and sometimes on the other; sometimes in, and sometimes out, ’till at length he is jerk’d out of his honesty, and his constituents out of their freedom’. (II. iii. 35-39) In all these examples, the metaphors of battle inevitably illustrate the problems and the possibilities that true free agency implies, for such agency demands a very specific social and political transformation — the establishment of gender equity — that provides for the space in which women’s bodies may engage and profit from that transformation. Like Cowley, other female dramatists appropriate the Spanish imaginary, notably Sophia Lee in Almeyda; Queen of Granada (1796) and Felicia

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Hemans in The Siege of Valencia (1823).15 Indeed, the exploration of national character through a politics of the theater captures the historical mood about the inculcation of patriotic sentiments in mass audiences, as Betsy Bolton contends in her book Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage. Bolton regards the ‘theatrical analogy’ as crucial to an understanding of female dramatists of the period. She writes: ‘Late eighteenth-century discussions of theatre and politics tend to dwell on the theatre’s ability to shape a mass of spectators into an audience and, by extension, its power to shape that audience into a nation’.16 The ‘theatrical analogy’ lends itself to a philosophy of ‘just paternalism’, which, to be sure, superficially justifies a conservative social and cultural politics, but the increasingly international character of many of the dramas provides an opening for female dramatists to ‘highlight and undercut the contemporary overlap of sentimental and imperial ideologies’.17 Again, ‘Spain’ manifests itself as an apt geo-critical landscape because the woman’s body becomes the site of contentious possession, though in these cases, the woman’s body is circumscribed within the tragic context of cross-cultural conflict, with Almeyda and Elmina caught within the Reconquista, the Castilian-Moorish epic clash that concludes with the expulsion of the Moors (and the Jews). In addition, both tragic heroines, Almeyda (Lee) and Elmina (Hemans), make decisions (or refuse to make them) that ensure their alienation inside their own cultures. This self-imposed otherness exemplifies the translatio Saglia identifies as essential to uncovering the ideologies of British women dramatists who have embedded their beliefs within Spanish figurations. Though generically distinct from Cowley’s comedy, Sophia Lee’s Almeyda; Queen of Granada evinces the same rhetorical strategies and military flourishes that are integral to Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband. The ‘Prologue’, written by Sophia’s sister Harriet, sets a martial tone by invoking the tragic Muses who have long stood with ‘patriot Honour [who has] seal’d his faith with blood’. The Muses have graced ‘Albion’s happy land’ by ironically providing the inspiration for the ‘martial scenes’ of 15

16

17

Sophia Lee, Almeyda: Queen of Granada, from British Women Playwrights around 1800, ed. by Diego Saglia (1999) . Because there are no line numberings for the play, all references first cite the act and then the page number. Felicia Hemans, The Siege of Valencia, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson and Elizabeth Fay (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002). Because this play has no divisions by act, all references to Hemans’s play are to scene and line number(s). Betsy Bolton, Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 11. Bolton, p. 42.

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Shakespearean Henrys and Hotspurs; ‘the bright pencil of the tragic muse’ must continue this tradition, ‘Her sacred rainbow draws o’er chilling dews; | And tho’ to air the transient glories run, | They give the promise of a golden sun!’18 The scene is recapitulated in the opening act, in which Almeyda takes over the Moorish castle that abuts the Guadalquivir River, with the additional stage direction that ‘bright fleecy clouds rise behind the painted glass representing the dawn of day’.19 Harriet and Sophia Lee clearly wish to emphasize the personal and social renewal that arises from the tragic engagements of the play’s characters, but the promise of change cannot prevent the ruinous consequences of either war or the sinister palace politics entailed by peace. The King of Castile and surrogate father to Almeyda, Ramirez, acknowledges the daybreak and blesses his daughter Victoria. When Victoria requests he bless Almeyda, in many ways his stepdaughter but who that day ceases to be his Castilian hostage, becoming instead the Queen of Granada, he admonishes Victoria for her sympathies. While he acknowledges ‘sweet Almeyda’ and her ‘heart alive to nature and humanity’, he also reminds Victoria that that ‘to death I hate the Moorish race, | Vindictive and insatiate — tho’ my sword | Ev’n yet could flame amid my country’s foes | With energy unbroken’.20 While Ramirez sadly comprehends that Almeyda has been the unwitting hostage to the ongoing Iberian struggle for territorial control and dominance, he also recognizes that with her ascension to the Moorish throne, she must learn that ‘Monarchs oft | Must sacrifice each feeling to their duty’. His feelings and hers are irrelevant to their respective duties as national leaders. His final advice to Victoria is to ‘learn to pierce through the veil of policy, | Undazzled by its colours. — So thy friend | Shall better meet the future’.21 Perhaps not surprisingly, this seemingly sound advice is utterly masculinist, effectively forcing Almeyda to assume the mantle of manhood since she must ‘pierce’ the ‘veil,’ the one Moorish garment that hides and protects a woman’s femininity. Almeyda is unfairly expected to sacrifice her body on the altar of political expediency, an impossible task given her bifurcated status. From the beginning of the play, she is doomed as both a woman and as a mother of the nation. Castilian enemy and friend, Moorish leader yet cultural outsider, Almeyda is the Orientalized embodiment of the long-standing struggles in Iberian politics and history, struggles that apparently have no short-term resolution or long-term end. Indeed, the 18 19 20 21

Lee, Almeyda, ‘Prologue,’ pp. 2-3. Ibid., p. 4. Lee, Almeyda, I. p. 6. Ibid., pp. 5-6.

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leaders of both the Castilians and the Moors have a vested interest in their continuation. Raised (and abandoned) by the Castilians, Almeyda must, without any process of assimilation, become the Queen of Granada. In love with Alonzo, Ramirez’s son, she is urged to marry Abdallah’s son Orasmyn to augment her power and maintain the peace, naturally at the expense of her own feelings. Urged to be passionate and dispassionate, august and reasonable, split in her allegiances, Almeyda cannot ever act in the play, whether to save herself or others. And she recognizes almost immediately that it is her imperial body that becomes fixed to Moorish national interests. She exclaims to Abra: Are these the charms of empire? Have we pow’r To give that happiness, we ne’er must know? Makes her heart’s free election, and adorns With life’s first charm a poor, and vulgar home! — While rank, that splendid misery to woman, Enchains us to the car of victor man: And barterd now by policy, now honor, We buy an enemy, or we fix a friend!22

Almeyda’s speech touches upon all the major themes — the ‘charms’ of imperial holdings, the often sleazy side of politics in which we can ally with enemies and abandon friends, and finally where the body of the woman is the locus of gender division and inequity. Almeyda’s paradoxical position of powerful queen and imprisoned woman calls into question whether or not she ever has the freedom to choose for herself within her own culture. As a result, Almeyda dreads the presence of Abdallah, the power behind the Moorish throne, because ‘On his brow | Lives a black penetration, which deep-pierces | Thro’ virtue’s thin and variable complexion, | Extracting oft, in blushes, the soul’s meaning’. Abdallah’s ‘black penetration,’ a stark metaphor for his political deviousness, even stoops to tempt Almeyda with his own deference: ‘How could I cherish, worship, love Almeyda | Would she but deign alike to bend her nature!’. When she refuses to submit to his will and marry Orasmyn, suggesting that ‘It is my diadem, not me you woo’, Abdallah scornfully responds: ‘Were that Orasmyn’s object, he might wear it. | Who shall oppose his will? A feeble woman! | Of little estimation in society, | And less in empire — ’.23 Her nobility convinces Alonzo to risk death by crossing the Guadalquivir to see her, and her deeply held passion for Alonzo also forces Orasmyn to relinquish his own to desire to marry her. 22 23

Lee, Almeyda, II., p. 5. Lee’s italics. Ibid., pp. 7-10.

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Still, though both the Moorish and Castilian princes adore her, work to save her, and sacrifice for her, they fail miserably, and she predictably dies a tragic death, poisoned by the medicines of Abdallah, who, in fit of paternal self-immolation, also poisons himself, covering his own culpability and malice to the bitter end. In essence, the narrative essentially implodes, unfolding inevitably as tragedy, because it cannot resolve the racial, cultural, and generational tensions that the image of Almeyda’s dead body concretizes as queen of Granada and potential queen of Castile, and as mother of warring nations. According to Giorgio Agamben, the paradox of sovereignty ‘consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order’. Furthermore, Agamben argues, the degree to which sovereignty ‘marks the limits […] of the juridical order will become clear only once the structure of the paradox is grasped’. 24 Female sovereigns grasp this paradox all too well because even once apprehended, their ability to delimit order, juridical or otherwise, is constantly under siege, given that their femininity undermines the public perception of their sovereignty. In the case of Almeyda, she is the ‘solitary sov’reign! born to weep | The greatness thousands covet!’ She is, according to Victoria, ‘A Moor in name alone, Granada’s throne | Charms not her heart — possess’d and alienate’. ‘Solitary,’ ‘alone,’ ‘alienate’ — descriptions of personal isolation required by rulers who alone can mark the boundaries of social and political order. This is why Ramirez, King of Castile, mildly upbraids his daughter, reminding her that ‘Monarchs oft | Must sacrifice each feeling to their duty’. The natural feelings for self must be sacrificed for the good of the nation, for in order to negotiate with her people and hold her enemies at bay, Almeyda must, in Ramirez’s words, ‘conceal those passions to be great | Subdue them to be happy. In the mind all sov’reignty begins, and ends’.25 Doubly marginalized, Almeyda must remain aloof to the calls of her own womanhood, subordinating her wishes to the demands of the citizens, as well as to the demands of her race. The cover story of the play concerns the regulation of passions, the implication being that without such emotional control characters meet bad ends. The King of Castile says so at the beginning of the play: ‘[Almeyda] must conceal those passions to be great | Subdue them to be happy,’ and Hamet confirms it at the end, ‘Yet such scenes [of death] alone | Can shew the danger of those cherish’d passions, | Which thus can

24

25

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Boazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.15. Lee, Almeyda, I. p. 5

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antedate the hour of death, | Or make existence agony!’26 But the translatio is clear: Self-expression is dangerous to women, and their attempts to construct an appropriate language for their feelings are usually punished, their full integration into the social and cultural matrix thwarted by implicit and explicit demands for their compliance. In The Siege of Valencia, war and race, especially as they pertain to the woman’s body, again dominate the narrative. Hemans presents her heroine Elmina with Hobson’s choice — plead with the Moorish chief (Abdallah) for the release of her sons whom he has captured in a brazen attempt to break the will of the besieged Valencians or accept her sons’ martyrdom as a necessary sacrifice for the good of the Spanish nation that has struggled valiantly to repulse the Oriental invaders. Ultimately terrorized into compliance by her adamantine husband, jingoistic daughter, and fanatical priest, Elmina accepts her tragic role of maternal martyr, and the King of Castile ultimately rescues Valencia from Moorish tyranny — if on the back of Spanish motherhood. The contamination of pure blood, hinted at in Almeyda: Queen of Granada, becomes the central theme of The Siege of Valencia. Motherhood must be protected at all costs because it produces the sons that protect national interests, but it also has the ‘potential […] to disrupt national politics, policies, and privileges by producing bodies for one’s enemies’. In Hemans’s play, the woman’s body is simultaneously the source of ideological affirmation and transgression. Indeed, as Cass argues, ‘The potential transgressiveness of the woman’s body partly explains the shrill insistence in The Siege of Valencia that Elmina, the mother of two sons captured by the Moors, maintain nationalist and religious party lines and not be moved by maternal affections to save them’.27 The mother’s voice is filtered through incompatible ideological claims. As a mother of boys Elmina naturally wishes to protect them from the violence of her enemies, but as a mother of heroic men, Elmina must naturally permit them to combat the nation’s enemies. But she cannot do both at the same time. ‘The race of the Cid’ will survive only if she bends her will to the greater good, allowing the state to prevent the possibility of her capture by the Moors and thereby compromise the purity of her maternal body, a far more important national goal than the retrieval of her kidnapped sons or even the life of her husband, who in the end predictably dies in battle to save Valencia. The men must sacrifice their bodies for hers, for she is the one who

26 27

Ibid., p. 7; V., p. 17 Jeffrey Cass, “‘The Race of the Cid’: Blood, Darkness, and the Captivity Narrative in Felicia Hemans’s The Siege of Valencia’, European Romantic Review, 17 (2006), pp. 317, 318.

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must remain safe so that the race of the Cid can remain safe. Yet she certainly does not regard this argument as anything but a masculinist canard. With amazing vehemence, she shouts at Gonzalez: My heart is bursting, and I must be heard! Heaven hath given power to mortal agony As to the elements in their hour of might And mastery o’er creation! — Who shall dare To mock that fearful strength? — I must be heard! Give me my sons! (i. 281-286)

While she erroneously suggests that her ‘bursting’ maternal heart should comprise more than enough elemental power to overcome any ideological objections that Gonzalez might raise, Elmina is even more exasperated with Hernandez than her husband. Hernandez is the unrelenting warrior-priest, who actually describes at one point how he kills his own son for the good of Castile. It is to his stubborn and doctrinaire attitudes that she addresses the following questions: What led me here? Why did I turn to thee in my despair? Love hath no ties upon thee; what had I To hope from thee, thou lone and childless man! Go to thy silent home! — there no young voice Shall bid thee welcome, no light footstep spring Forth at the sound of thine! — What knows thy heart? (ii. 232-38)

Her apoplectic question — ’What knows thy heart’ — not so subtly reinforces the notion that only a mother’s heart can understand the predicament of sons in danger, of a family in jeopardy. Of his own making, Hernandez’s ‘childless’ condition resonates with her position that the actions of mothers are somehow always justified, if such actions involve the safety of their children. Motherhood allows Elmina to unleash her feelings for the sake of her sons. She even employs the sympathetic ‘heart’ metaphor in her agonizing request to Abdallah, the Moorish chief who holds her sons hostage, to free them: ‘Where shall your high heart | Find refuge then, if in the day of might | Woe hath lain prostrate, bleeding at your feet, | And you have pitied not?’ (iv.136-139) Further, when her daughter Ximena dies after having visions of glorious and bloody battle, ‘I see it still! | ‘Tis floating, like a glorious cloud on high, | My father’s banner! — Hear’st thou not a sound? | The trumpet of Castile!’ (viii.136-38), Elmina moans desperately:

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How should we bear The dark misgivings of our souls, if Heaven Left not such beings with us? — But is this Her wonted look? — too sad a quiet lies On its dim fearful beauty! — Speak, Ximena! Speak! — my heart dies within me! — she is gone […] (viii.146-51)

The range of emotions inscribed in her heart is wide — rage, despair, hysteria — yet her actual response to the deaths of her sons and husband is, rather unexpectedly, a kind of acceptance: She that wears In her deep heart the memory of thy love Shall thence draw strength for all things, till the God, Whose hand around her hath unpeopled earth, Looking upon her still and chasten’d soul, Call it once more to thine! (ix. 223-228)

Elmina’s quiescence in this passage clashes notably with her earlier pleas for her sons’ clemency and with her emotional outbursts with nearly all the play’s characters, suggesting, somewhat ironically, the instability of motherhood, rather than the conventional stability normally associated with it. As Susan Wolfson contends, Elmina is a signifier of unease, for she reifies ‘the failure of domestic ideals, in whatever cultural variety, to sustain and fulfill women’s lives’.28 Her wild heart beats within a body that bristles at subjection because it is the subject upon which the Castilian nation is ideologically interpellated. Like Victoria and Almeyda, she is a figure from the Spanish imaginary that represents the specter of war, the insecurities of race, the clash of competing cultures, and the menace of the Oriental Other. Gonzalez’s body is literally carried off the stage as an image of nationalist triumph, but it is Elmina’s body, her quietism notwithstanding, that holds the lingering image of terror. Victoria, Almeyda, and Elmina function as ‘mothers of the nation,’ as Anne Mellor coins the term, with that epithet leading her to the conclusion that ‘the leading playwrights of the Romantic era consciously used the theater to re-stage and thereby revise both the social construction of gender and the nature of good government’. Furthermore, for Mellor, these playwrights engage in a polemic that challenges patriarchy by providing powerful,

28

Susan Wolfson, ‘Felicia Hemans and the Dilemmas of Gender’, in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Hafner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 145.

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virtuous women as counter-examples to ‘the men currently in power’.29 Nevertheless, while Victoria, Almeyda, and Elmina embody counterhegemonic ‘figurations of Iberia’ (to use Saglia’s phrase) and hence form a critique of the patriarchy that dominates them, they also raise the specters of equivocation and uncertainty. When should a woman employ deceit to draw a man back into social conformity? When should a female monarch cave in to overweening social and political pressures that are not brought equally to bear on their male counterparts? When should motherhood support a nationalist ethos and when should natural, maternal feelings for one’s children contravene those civic responsibilities, irrespective of the consequences? How can the exercise of femininity and the exercise of political power co-exist? The cases of Victoria, Almeyda, and Elmina provide conflicted answers to these questions. And while Mellor is surely right when she asserts that ‘the voices and bodies of women dominate the [Romantic] stage’, what this dominance consists of is less certain, for Hannah Cowley, Sophia Lee, and Felicia Hemans do not necessarily ‘put forth the claim,’ as Mellor believes happens with the plays of Joanna Baillie, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘to ultimate moral, cultural, and political authority’.30 Indeed, staging ‘Spain’ in A Bold Stroke for a Husband; Almeyda, Queen of Granada; and The Siege of Valencia — draws from the Spanish imaginary that circumscribes the national geography of these plays and invites discomposure, fragmentation, and doubt into the moral, cultural, and political mix. To quote Homi Bhabha, ‘the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality’.31 Given the translatio of the Spanish ‘nation’ in these texts, these British women writers intimate, through their ‘Spanish’ surrogates, that mothers may appear to support a clear and justifiable nationalist ethos, but the gendered ‘social reality’ to which they actually allude is far less solid, far less certain, and perhaps far less desirable than might be suggested by the high social roles that they occupy. The looming presence of these national mothers in the work of Cowley, Lee, and Hemans ultimately signifies how untidy, messy, difficult, and dislocating the staging of gender is for women playwrights of the period.

29

30 31

Anne Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 39. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, p. 68. Bhabha, Homi K. ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’ in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Boazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’ in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-7. Bolton, Betsy. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Cass, Jeffrey. ‘“The Race of the Cid”: Blood, Darkness, and the Captivity Narrative in Felicia Hemans’ The Siege of Valencia’, European Romantic Review, 17 (2006), 315-326. Cowley, Hannah, A Bold Stroke For a Husband in The Broadview Anthology of RomanticDrama, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003) Hemans, Felicia, The Siege of Valencia in The Parallel Text Edition, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson and Elizabeth Fay (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002) Jewett, William, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997) Lee, 6RSKLDAlmeyda: Queen of Granada, from British Women Playwrights around 1800, ed. by Diego Saglia (1999) Lopez, J.D. ‘Abstract: Cowley’s Bold Stroke for a Husband and the CrossGendered Spanish Setting’, Conference Program for British Women Playwrights, 1780-1830 (2005) Mellor, Anne. Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) Purinton, Marjean, ‘Abstract: On Teaching A Bold Stroke for a Husband And Other Comedies by Romantic Women Playwrights’, Conference Program for British Women Playwrights, 1780-1830 (2005) Richardson, Alan. ‘Epic Ambivalence: Imperial Politics and Romantic Deflection in Williams’s Peru and Landor’s Gebir’, in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 265-282. Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).

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—— ,‘Spanish Stages: British Romantic Politics and the Theatrical Politics of Spain, 1808-1823’, European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), 19-32. Wolfson, Susan. ‘Felicia Hemans and the Dilemmas of Gender’ in ReVisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Hafner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp.128-166.

Cristina Flores

‘Imported seeds’: The Role of William Wordsworth in Miguel de Unamuno’s Poetic Renewal Miguel de Unamuno’s high regard for British literature and culture is a well-known fact. It has already been pointed out by Sánchez Barbudo (1950), Earle (1960), García Blanco (1959, 1965) and, more recently, by Doce (2005) and Perojo Arronte (2007). His reading of British literary works was extensive, yet, among British authors, he felt the deepest fondness for Romantic poetry. This preference is easily recognisable in the volumes held in his private library in Salamanca. There, Unamuno kept the poetical works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron as well as some critical volumes totally or partially devoted to Romantic poetry. The present work should be understood as a step towards attaining a more comprehensive view of the reception and influence of British Romantic poetry and poetics in Unamuno. My purpose is to explore the actual reception of certain Romantic ideas, poetic patterns, and images in the Spanish author and their recognizable echoes in his wide production in prose and verse.

The Lake Poets: Imported Seeds Y así es que soy yo, de los escritores españoles de mi generación, el único casi que tiene prestigio en América, y me llaman europeo o universal, y no español. [...] Yo insisto en que nuestro pueblo está capacitado para gustar musings a lo Wordsworth o a lo Coleridge.1

The influential Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) always took pride in the fact that he was unique among his countrymen because of his Europeanism and universality. He sided against the contemporary Spanish trend of poetry which, to him, was highly impersonal and devoid of any intellectual and emotional depth. In Unamuno’s view, contemporary poetry was nothing but the artificial expression of certain linguistic skills.2 In order to redress this situation, Don Miguel envisioned a renewal of Spanish poetry following the model of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s musings. At the time he wrote the passage cited above, Miguel de Unamuno 1

2

From a letter to Juan Arzadun, December 12, 1900. Quoted in Peter G. Earle, Unamuno and English Literature (New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1960), p. 87. In the essay ‘Intimidad de los escritos’, Unamuno writes: ‘Y todo ello ha contribuido a engendrar un estilo impersonal, correcto y claro, que no pasa de ser una habilidad profesional, una destreza técnica y una de las más felices invenciones para ahorrarse el escritor pensar y sentir.’ Quoted in Teresa Imizcoz Beunza, La teoría poética de Miguel de Unamuno (Pamplona: Eunsa, 1996), p.150.

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was thirty-six years old and by then he was well acquainted with many foreign authors. He was especially well versed in British literature, which he read avidly during the course of his life. William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and the novelists Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens are some of the British authors whom he read and admired. However, as he often admitted, his most important influence was that of the British Romantic poets. He owned the poetical works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.3 Thus, it is not surprising to find Wordsworth and Coleridge as the epitome of his European influences in the quotation above. In fact, Unamuno’s uniqueness and difference from other contemporary Spanish authors can be partly explained from this acquaintance. Conscious of the multitude of sources that contributed to the development of his thought, Unamuno frequently discussed the notion of influence. Thus, in the essay ‘De la enseñanza superior en España’ (1899), he uses the metaphor of ‘imported seeds’ to explain how important foreign influences should be in the evolution of contemporary Spanish literature: Si nos adaptamos al ambiente europeo, no tendremos patria y esa adaptación no se cumplirá importando ideas europeas para aquí expenderlas con el consiguiente recargo de aduana, sino aprendiendo a fabricarlas y fraguando nuestra propia potencia de idealizar, elevando talleres más que bazares de ideas. Para ello hace falta evocar la productividad toda de nuestro pueblo, arar muy hondo nuestro suelo espiritual antes que en él echemos las semillas importadas, que darán al cabo trigo nuestro. 4

According to Unamuno’s words, foreign influences should not be directly adopted to supplant national literature. Indeed, the national cannot be obviated or rejected since it is the soil where imported seeds must be 3

4

The following volumes are housed in Unamuno’s private library at Salamanca: Poetical Works of Wordsworth (London: Frederick Warne, 1875), reprint of the 1827 edition; The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. by E. H. Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1905); Poems of William Blake, ed. by W. B. Yeats (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1905); The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by W. B. Scott (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1880). Unamuno also owned some critical volumes devoted to British Romantic poetry: Francis Jeffrey, Essays on English Poets and Poetry: from the Edinburgh Review (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1900); Julio Calcaño, Tres poetas pesimistas del siglo XIX: estudio crítico por Julio Calcaño (Caracas: Tipografía Universal, 1907); Thomas De Quincey, Reminiscences of English Lake Poetry (London: J. M. Dent, 1907); John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878). Miguel de Unamuno, Obras completas (Madrid: Escelicer, 1969), I, p. 769, my italics. I will quote from this edition of Unamuno’s complete works. The title Obras completas followed by number of volume and pages will appear parenthetically in the text.

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introduced to beget the best poetry possible. This implies an intermediate intellectual process through which the poet makes foreign ideas his own. Miguel de Unamuno’s high regard for British literature has already been pointed out by Peter G. Earle, Manuel García Blanco, and, more recently, by Jordi Doce.5 Some works have been published which focus on the influence of S. T. Coleridge upon the Spanish author but, as far as I know, nothing of the sort has been done about the other member of the poetic partnership that brought forth the Lyrical Ballads.6 This will be my task here. Although the present study is mainly concerned with William Wordsworth’s influence, it is important to note that these two authors had a common impact upon Unamuno, who frequently mentioned them together as los poetas lakistas. Consequently, one of the main difficulties of this study is to distinguish the ideas Unamuno took from Wordsworth from those he borrowed from Coleridge, as they shared a body of ideas that the Spanish author recognised as common to both of them. The naturalness of poetic language, the confessional and conversational tone, and the communion of nature and soul proposed by these poets became powerful stimuli for the Spanish author and, more specifically, to the meditative and reclusive aspects of his personality. In fact, the first reference to British poets that we find in Unamuno is dedicated to these two authors. Being only twenty-one, he wrote: ‘Desde el balcón se ve un hermoso paisaje, pero no soy poeta lakista y dejo al cuidado ajeno el imaginarse tal paisaje, asegurando que es más hermoso lo que se adivina que lo que se ve’. (Obras completas, I, p. 171) There are many instances in which the Spanish poet acknowledges the Lake Poets’ influence as when he admits in 1899 that: ‘Ningún poeta francés moderno me produce la hondísima impresión que los musings de Coleridge o Wordsworth o las

5

6

See Manuel García Blanco, ‘Poetas ingleses en la obra de Unamuno’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 36 (1959), 88-106; and ‘Unamuno y la cultura inglesa’, Filología Moderna, 19-20 (1965), 25-157; Jordi Doce, Imán y desafío. Presencia del romanticismo ingles en la poesía española contemporánea (Barcelona: Península, 2005). For a discussion about the reception of Coleridge in Unamuno see the following: Bautista, Francisco, ‘El poeta en su biblioteca: Unamuno y la Biographia Literaria de Coleridge’, Ínsula: Revista de letras y ciencias humanas, 643 (2000), 11-13. See also Cristina Flores Moreno, ‘‘‘That Marvellous Coleridge”: The Influence of S. T. Coleridge’s Poetry and Poetics in Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)’, Coleridge Bulletin, NS 3 (2008), 41-47; and ‘Nature Imagined in S. T. Coleridge’s Meditative Poems and Miguel de Unamuno Poesías: A Study on Reception’, Journal of English Studies, 5 (2009), in press; Perojo Arronte, María Eugenia, ‘A Path for Literary Change: The Spanish Break with Tradition and the Role of Coleridge’s Poetry and Poetics in Twentieth-Century Spain’, in The Reception of Coleridge in Europe, ed. by Elinor Shaffer and E. Zuccato (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 167-196.

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monótonas melopeas de Browning’.7 Moreover, in 1901, Unamuno was asked by Federico Urdiales to name the Spanish and foreign authors who had exerted a major influence upon his work. He is then forced to write an epistolary ‘autobiographia literaria’ where he confesses: ‘podría señalar a Hegel, Spencer, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, Leopardi, Tolstoi, como mis mejores maestros, uniendo a ellos los pensadores de dirección religiosa y los líricos ingleses’. Among the English lyricists, Unamuno always highlighted his preference for Wordsworth and Coleridge. Previously in the same letter, he had written: ‘Pero tanto o más que de filósofos o pensadores he sufrido la impresión de poetas, del gran Leopardi (me lo sé casi de memoria) ante todo, y de la lírica inglesa (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, etc.), que es la que prefiero.’8 Don Miguel tries to bring back the meditative line of poetry, and as British models he chooses Coleridge and Wordsworth, inaugurators of the Romantic tradition.

Reading and Marking Wordsworth’s Poetical Works The period between the year 1885 and 1907 appears to be the one in which Unamuno’s intellect was most fully impregnated with the influence of the Lake Poets. It has already been noted that his first reference to these authors was comparatively early, in 1885. Unfortunately, he did not record the sources of his first acquaintance with Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems. Nevertheless, in 1890 he claimed he frequently witnessed Vicente de Arana reciting poems by these two authors. (Obras completas, III, p. 1252) To my knowledge Arana, who published translations of poems by Tennyson, Keats, and Byron, never published translations of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Moreover, no other Spanish translations of these poems existed. Therefore, Unamuno’s relation with them was not mediated by any translation; he learnt the English language to enjoy British literature first-hand. He declared: ‘He tenido una especie de manía de aprender lenguas y un decidido empeño de explorar literaturas extranjeras [...] Y así, luego que pude leer inglés, me apresuré a leer a Wordsworth antes que a Byron’. (Obras completas, IV, p. 940) Unamuno, who was an omnivorous reader, owned The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (1875; repr. 1827). Don Miguel’s interest in both Coleridge and Wordsworth led him to buy a 1907 edition of Thomas De 7 8

Rubén Darío, Obras completas, 22 vols (Madrid: Biblioteca Rubén Darío, 1926), XIII, p. 166. Unpublished letter quoted in Manuel García Blanco, Don Miguel de Unamuno y sus poesías: estudio y antología de poemas inéditos o no incluidos en sus libros (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1954), p.89.

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Quincey’s Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets. He was a highly active and conscious reader, and he used to annotate, mark and index books as he pored over them. These marks and notes in Unamuno’s books are accessible today for our perusal in his private library at Salamanca. Undoubtedly, these annotated volumes are an invaluable testimony of those authors and ideas which Unamuno most admired. The marks and notes he penned in Wordsworth’s volume of poems can serve as a guide in our exploration of those aspects that the Spanish author found most appealing. According to the horizontal pencil marks that Unamuno made next to the titles of the poems in the table of contents, it can be affirmed that he read all the poems in the volume. There are some poems that receive a greater number of short vertical strokes adjacent to their title than the rest, allowing us to identify those he found more alluring. ‘The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale’ and ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ are the poems that were given the greatest number of marks by far, eight, signalling his preference. These are followed in number of strokes, four or five, by ‘My Heart Leaps Up when I Behold’, ‘To a Butterfly’, ‘The Pet Lamb’, ‘A Complaint’, ‘Repentance’, ‘The Affliction of Margaret’, belonging to “Poems Referring to the Period of Childhood”; ‘Ruth’, ‘Laodamia’, ‘Her Eyes Are Wild, Her Head Is Bare’, ‘Resolution and Independence’ and ‘The Thorn’ and ‘To a Skylark’ — from “Poems of the Imagination”; ‘A Parsonage in Oxfordshire’, from “Miscellaneous Sonnets”; and ‘Invocation to the Earth’. The Spanish author also wrote down the page numbers where he had come across the most stimulating passages on the last blank page of the volume. Apart from his obviously attentive perusal of Wordsworth’s poetical works, additional proofs of his devotion for the British poet are the translations of some of Wordsworth’s poems into Spanish and the verses he dedicated to him, including a poem entitled ‘Wordsworth’ (1928) published in his collection of poems, Cancionero: diario poético (1928-1936).9 Unamuno translated Wordsworth’s ‘Written upon a Blank Leaf in The Compleat Angler’ in the short essay ‘El perfecto pescador de caña’ (1904) and ‘The Child is the Father of Man’, and he paraphrased the first lines of ‘The Excursion’ in the essay ‘Cantos de la noche’ (1898). The clearest examples of this influence are found among the lines of his poems in the collections Poesías (1907), Rimas de Dentro (1923), and the aforementioned Cancionero, along with his short essays depicting natural landscapes in Paisajes (1902) and Andanzas y Visiones (1922). The echoes of Romanticism

9

Published posthumously in 1953.

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in Unamuno are not limited to these works, however, and more examples can be traced in the rest of his production.

Nature ‘Refined’ and Possessive Contemplation The influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge on Unamuno is first seen in his short essays published under the title Paisajes (1902) and his first collection of poems, Poesías (1907). The latter was a long-thought-out project which started some eight years before its publication. Already in 1899, the young Unamuno declared in a letter to Pedro Jiménez Ilundáin that his most immediate goal was to publish a small volume of poetry, which would include two translations, one of a poem by Coleridge, another by Leopardi.10 He thus translated Coleridge’s ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ and Leopardi’s ‘La Ginestra’. Poesías was a conscious and determined attempt to break with the Spanish poetic tradition current at the time. Inspired by his frequent readings of the Lake Poets, Unamuno’s intention was to contribute something new to contemporary poetry. Then, in 1899 he affirmed: ‘mi poesía aporta algo a las letras españolas de hoy [...] en cuanto al fondo se parece a los musings ingleses, a la poesía meditativa inglesa, la de Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, etc’.11 And two months later he stated: ‘Guardo, a la vez, reflexiones acerca de la poesía meditativa, sugeridas por mis frecuentes lecturas de Leopardi, de Wordsworth, de Coleridge’.12 Unamuno was attracted not only by the Romantic turn to conversational and natural language, but also, he points out, by the reflections about the nature of poetry that underlie their verses. The Spanish author recognised what Coleridge himself once acknowledged: ‘I cannot write without a body of thought — hence my Poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas and Imagery’.13 Following the Romantics, Unamuno posits that poetry should not be a mere empty affectation but the vehicle for important thoughts. One of the annotations in the last blank page of Wordsworth’s volume is the number of pages belonging to the ‘Memoir’ of the introduction. Marks in the margins signal the specific passages that drew his attention; interestingly, these are sections 10 11

12 13

Unpublished letter, quoted in García Blanco, Don Miguel de Unamuno, p. 10. Unpublished letter to Ruiz Contreras, 24 May 1899. Quoted in García Blanco, Don Miguel de Unamuno, p. 6. Unpublished letter, quoted in García Blanco, Don Miguel de Unamuno, p. 17. S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. by E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), I, p. 137.

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in which Wordsworth defends the intellectual and moral content of his poems: There is scarcely one of my poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution’. […] Every great poet is a teacher. I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing. […] Never forget what I believe was observed by Coleridge — that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.14

The expression of philosophical thoughts became one of the chief principles of Unamuno’s new poetics. The first three poems in Poesías, entitled ‘¡Id con Dios!’, ‘Credo poético’ and ‘Denso, Denso’, serve the purpose of a poetic manifesto, and in the latter he writes: ‘Mira, amigo, cuando libres | Al mundo tu pensamiento, | Cuida que sea ante todo | Denso, denso’. (Obras completas, VI, p. 169) The expression of ‘density’ in thought does not imply the use of overblown style; in fact, one of the features of Spanish verse which he most energetically combats is a vacuous, pretentious style. Subscribing to what the Romantic poets proposed in the preface to the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Unamuno advocates the choice of natural, unaffected language.15 This is the central message in ‘Credo poético’: ‘No te cuides en exceso del ropaje, | De escultor y no de sastre es tu tarea, | No te olvides de que nunca más hermosa | Que desnuda está la idea’. (Obras completas, VI, p. 169) Peter Earle and Julián Jiménez Hefferman agree that the main lesson drawn by Unamuno from the Lake Poets is to place the poem in a particular and recognizable setting, which is in most cases a natural context.16 In fact, some scholarly works on Unamuno’s poetry have emphasized the concreteness of his verses as one of the idiosyncratic features which differentiates him from the poems produced by his contemporaries. Franciso Yndurain underlines this aspect of the Spanish poet’s production, stating that his poems are born out of definite or concrete experience. He also observes that Unamuno used to record accurately the date of composition, together with

14 15

16

Poetical Works of William Wordsworth ,‘Memoir’, p. xxxiii. ‘The majority of the following poems are to be considered experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.’ William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 106. Julián Jiménez Heffernan, La palabra emplazada: Meditación y Contemplación de Herbert a Valente (Córdoba: Servicio de publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba, 1998).

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the precise circumstances in which the inspiration emerged: a journey, a visit, a domestic incident, thus making of the poems a true diary.17 Nevertheless, in both Coleridge and Wordsworth the contemplation of the local is only the first, yet necessary, step towards the eventual apprehension of the universal. As Jordi Doce observes: ‘la importancia que otorga Unamuno a la lírica inglesa reside en su capacidad de conducción del elemento meditativo, que tanto en Coleridge como en Wordsworth forma parte de un intento de extraer valores de la experiencia’.18 The Spanish poet appreciates the universal in Wordsworth when he compares the Lake Poet with Byron and states: ‘Éste es, sin duda, más cosmopolita, pero aquél me parece más universal’. (Obras completas, IV, p. 940, my italics) Unamuno learnt from the Lake Poets that only through the particular and mutable can the poet achieve knowledge of the universal and eternal. Consequently, he confessed in 1902: ‘Cada día ahonda y se enraíza en mí más la convicción de que al hombre universal y eterno hay que ir a sacarlo del seno del hombre local y pasajero’. (III, p. 725) And some years later, in ‘Cosmopolitismo y universalidad’ (1908), he declared: ‘Sin moverse del pueblo en que usted está puede llegar a la más alta universalidad de espíritu’. (IV, p. 942) This is another of the core ideas he put into verse in ‘Credo poético’: Que tus cantos sean cantos esculpidos, Ancla en tierra mientras tanto que se elevan, el lenguaje es ante todo pensamiento, y es pensada su belleza. Sujetemos las verdades del espíritu Las entrañas de las formas pasajeras, Que la Idea reine en todo soberana; Esculpemos, pues, la niebla. (Obras completas, VI, p. 169)

Unamuno came across many examples of the transcendental noetic value of verse that starts from the contemplation of particular phenomena in the natural world in Wordsworth’s volume. The first annotation he pencilled in the last blank page of the volume reads: ‘Refinamiento 277’. This is the page number for ‘To the Spade of a Friend’ and ‘To My Sister’, which praise the beatitudes of nature and the emotional enjoyment that can be obtained with the appropriate contemplative attitude. The message transmitted in the last two lines of ‘To the Spade of a Friend’ made a powerful impression on

17

18

Francisco Yndurain, ‘Unamuno en su poética y como poeta’, in Miguel de Unamuno, ed. Antonio Sanchez Barbudo (Madrid: Taurus, 1974), pp. 323-348 (p. 346). Doce, Imán y desafío, p. 119

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Unamuno since he translated and quoted them from the original in the short essay ‘Ciudad y campo’, published in 1902: Ahora me acude a la memoria el terrible ejemplo del pobre Roberto Burns, devorado por la vida ciudadana, y junto a su recuerdo el de la serena tranquilidad de los lakistas, y sobre todo de aquel dulcísimo y nobilísimo Wordsworth, que, lejos del tráfago ciudadano, vivió en santa comunión con la Naturaleza, gozando de ‘elegantes goces, que son puros como lo es la naturaleza, demasiado puros para ser refinados’. And elegant enjoyments, that are pure As nature is; too pure to be refined. (Obras completas, I, pp.1037-8)

The intellectual imprisonment suffered in the city contrasted to the freedom attained by immersion in nature is a recurrent topic in both Wordsworth and Coleridge. Unamuno’s poem ‘Una ciudad extranjera’, which moves from the description of the paradoxically isolating crowd in the city, Oporto, to a private shelter under a lime tree, evokes Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’. Sitting under the tree, the poet recalls memories of his childhood in nature and eventually perceives the harmonious unity of nature and man.19 There, ‘mecido en el aroma de los tilos’ he overcomes the isolation of the impersonal city and feels that nature joins us all: ‘lo que nos une | son las yerbas, los árboles, los frutos | y son las bestias’. (VI, p. 270) This poem also presents indisputable resemblances to Wordsworth’s ‘The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale’ which, as I said, received along with ‘Intimations’ the greatest number of marks by Unamuno in the table of contents.20 This poem depicts the involuntary ‘sad emigration’ of a pious farmer to London due to bankruptcy. (l. 45) The images of solitude and sadness in the crowd of the city are interrupted by the remembrance of his youth spent in nature: In the throng of the town like a stranger is he, Like one whose own country’s far over the sea; And Nature, while through the great city he hies,

19

20

Voy a sentarme aquí, bajo este tilo, Que me recuerda al tilo de mi pueblo, Aquel que alza su copa Donde rodó mi cuna Y es él cuna de pájaros Que cantaron los juegos de mi infancia. See Unamuno, Obras completas, VI, p. 269. All quotations from Wordsworth’s poems are from William Wordsworth: Poems, ed. by John O. Hayden, 2 vols (London: Penguin, 1977). Volume, page, and line numbers will be noted parenthetically in the text.

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Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise. This gives him the fancy of one that is young, More of soul in his face than of words on his tongue; Like a maiden of twenty he trembles and sighs, And tears of fifteen will come into his eyes. (I, p. 259, ll. 61-68)

Sweet memories of deep feelings provoked in the past are recalled in the poetic act; this is the theoretical ground upon which ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ is built.21 Wordsworth expounds his theory of recollection in tranquility in the preface to the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads: I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind. (Lyrical Ballads, p. 110)

Unamuno returns to Wordsworth’s theory in a meaningful passage of the short essay ‘Ciudad, Campo, Paisajes y Recuerdos’ (1911). He writes: ¿Hay acaso placer mayor que, sentado en las largas noches de invierno junto a la leña que arde y zumba en la chimenea, soñar en un paisaje favorito? [...] lo he sentido; he sentido al retirarme al reposo y silencio del lecho después de un día de duro trabajo y de agitación ciudadana [...] Aún hay más, y es que durante el verano y en las siempre breves vacaciones de que durante el curso puedo gozar, salgo a hacer repuesto de paisaje, a almacenar en mi magín [imaginación] y en mi corazón visiones de llanura, de sierra o de marina, para irme luego de ellas nutriendo en mi retiro. (Obras completas, I, p. 360)

The passage echoes Unamuno’s ‘En una ciudad extranjera’. This recollection of the feelings aroused by the past contemplation of nature provides the poet with a satisfactory escape from the present emotional barrenness of the city. Unamuno emphasises Wordsworth’s achieved communion with nature and the pure joys that derive from a serene and tranquil pose before it. The Spanish poet integrated the term ‘refinement’ into his critical discourse in order to denote the effect of art upon nature. The contemplative approach to nature discloses its purity, its essence, which is found behind a sensual 21

‘Though absent long, | These forms of beauty have not been to me, | As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: | But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din | Of town and cities, I have owed to them, | In hours of weariness, sensation sweet, | Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, | And passing even into my purer mind | With tranquil restoration.’ Wordsworth, Poems, I, p. 358, ll. 24-32.

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landscape. In the short unpublished essay ‘En los arribes del Duero’ (1898), in which he gives an account of a walking tour undertaken along the banks of the river Duero, Unamuno enters the following reflection: Nos enamoramos fácilmente de lo tosco y bravío, hasta de lo basto, y tendemos con frecuencia a desdeñar el refino que a la naturaleza da el arte, que es, a su modo, una verdadera naturaleza. [...] Así sucede con nuestros paisajes, que permanecen en bruto, como primeras materias de recreo y solaz para el espíritu, por falta de viajeros que los refinen a nuestros ojos con artísticas descripciones. [...] Los tan celebrados paisajes de Escocia, sus encantadores ‘lochs’, ¿no deben mucho del deleite con el que regalan a sus contempladores a que van estos sugestionados por Walter Scott y los lakistas?22

A decade later, he would again use the term ‘refined’ to describe the feeling produced by the contemplation of nature: ‘El sentimiento de la Naturaleza, […] es uno de los más refinados productos de la civilización y la cultura’.23 (Obras completas, I, p. 336) This feeling is hence the primary source of poetry and must be pursued by the potential poet. Wordsworth’s ‘To my sister’, written in 1798 in Alfoxden, embodies this ideal. The poem has the form of a notice sent to the poet’s sister when she is at home and he is at a distance from the house. He persuasively urges her to leave the house and join him in the enjoyment of nature: ‘make haste, your morning task resign; | come forth and feel the sun’. (I, p. 270, ll. 11-12) The idea that the contemplation of nature generates joy, already present in ‘To the Spade of a Friend’, is resumed here by Wordsworth: ‘There is a blessing in the air, | Which seems a sense of joy to yield | To the bare trees, and mountains bare, | And grass in the green field’. (I, p. 269, ll. 5-9) Unamuno’s poem ‘Por dentro’, also belonging to Poesías, reflects this twofold nature of the universe, maintaining the existence of another world inside the one we can see.24 He once declared: ‘Prefiero la poesía poética, la revolución del alma de las cosas. Para mí, la poesía es una traducción de la Naturaleza del espíritu’.25 Unamuno emulates Wordsworth’s poem in the essay ‘¡Adentro!’ (1900), where he also uses the imperative to instruct prospective authors to seek out nature: ‘Vete al campo, y en la soledad conversa con el universo si quieres, habla a la congregación de las cosas 22

23

24 25

Unpublished essay fully quoted in José Antonio Ereño Altuna, ‘Un texto inédito de Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo: Los arribes del Duero (1898)’, in Unamuno y Europa. Nuevos ensayos y viejos textos, ed. by Pedro Ribas (Madrid: Cuaderno Gris, 2002), pp. 117-128. My italics. My italics. See the essay titled ‘El sentimiento de la fortaleza’ (1909) included in Por tierras de Portugal y España, Obras completas, I, pp. 183-344. ‘Calla, que hay otro mundo | por dentro del que vemos’. Obras completas, VI, p. 241. Quoted in Miguel de Unamuno, ‘Unamuno en sus cartas’, in Ensayos, 2 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1951), II, p.37.

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todas’; ‘busca a la naturaleza’, ‘chapúzate en la naturaleza’. (Obras completas I, pp. 948, 951, 952) With the appropriate contemplative pose, the natural landscape reveals its inner spirit, as Unamuno wrote in the essay entitled ‘En Pagazarri’ (1893): los paisajes, […] mundo que se despierta y se revela al hombre mostrándole los tesoros escondidos de su espíritu. [...] En las obras del arte divino y puro, el reflejo de este mundo misterioso escondido en el alma del artista y hallado por él en ella con labor paciente, imagen más real del mundo real que la que nos da la conciencia ordinaria, nos revela el alma de las cosas de fuera. (Obras completas, I, p. 510)

‘The soul of the life of things’ again recalls Wordsworth, and the pages of other short essays by Unamuno such as ‘El silencio de la cima’ (1911) and ‘Paisajes del alma’ (1918) are imbued with the same discourse. The second annotation in Wordsworth’s complete works says ‘Para Pepe 274 los dos’ (For Pepe 274 both).26 The note references ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned; an Evening Scene, on the Same Subject’, which were first published in Lyrical Ballads. Curiously enough, Wordsworth states in his ‘Advertisement’ to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads that ‘The lines entitled Expostulation and Reply, and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of Moral Philosophy’. (Lyrical Ballads, p. 8) This friend was most probably S. T. Coleridge who already in 1796, two years before the publication of Lyrical Ballads, described himself as ‘a great reader & have read almost everything, a library-cormorant’.27 In ‘Expostulation and Reply’, the poet dramatises a conversation with a friend, who asks him why he prefers sitting on a stone for half a day dreaming instead of reading. He answers: ‘The eye — it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where’er they be, Against or with our will. ‘Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness. (I, p. 356, ll. 17- 24, my italics)

26 27

‘Pepe’ must be his friend Pedro Jiménez Ilundaín. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956-1971), I, p. 260.

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This poem is followed by ‘The Tables Turned’, where Wordsworth insists on his advice of going to receive nature instead of studying books: ‘Come forth into the light of things, | let Nature be your Teacher’.28 Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. (I, p. 357, ll. 30-34, my italics)

In Coleridge, Wordsworth, and later Unamuno, the relationship between nature and the poet is one of reciprocity: the poet refines nature through his art but, at the same time, the poet’s soul does not escape from nature’s mighty agency, which transforms the mind into an all-inclusive subject. Wordsworth describes in ‘To the Spade of a Friend’ how the powers of nature enter the poet’s mind and then make nature his: ‘Our minds shall drink at every pore | The spirit of the season’. (I, p. 719, ll. 24-28) This reciprocal relationship is the basis upon which Unamuno develops his theory of possessive contemplation, which was partly inspired by Wordsworth’s “Sonnets to the River Duddon”. Unamuno then calls our attention to the first page of the sonnets. They are profusely annotated with translations of the English words that he found difficult. This detail shows how carefully he read the sonnets, paying intense attention to the meaning of each word. Their impact on Unamuno’s work is best seen in the essay ‘El perfecto pescador de caña’, which he wrote in 1904. There, the Spanish author praised Wordsworth and particularly his sonnet ‘Written Upon a Blank Leaf in The Compleat Angler’ and ‘The River Duddon’. The essay opens with the following reference to the Romantic poet: ‘En uno de mis poetas favoritos, el dulcísimo Wordsworth, leí hace ya tiempo un soneto, que lleva este título: “Escrito en una hoja en blanco de El perfecto pescador de caña’’’. (Obras completas, I, p. 1183) And it follows with a translation of Wordsworth’s sonnet into Spanish.29 28

29

‘She [nature] has a world of ready wealth, | Our minds and hearts to bless — | Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, | Truth breathed by cheerfulness.’ Wordsworth, Poems, I, p. 357, ll.16-21. Unamuno writes of Walton: ‘Mientras se presten los corrientes ríos a un inocente deporte, vivirá el nombre de Walton; sabio benigno, cuya pluma, al esclarecernos los misterios de la caña y el torzal, nos exhortó, no sin fruto, a escuchar reverentemente cada revelación que la naturaleza pronuncie desde su rural santuario. Dulce, noblemente versado en sencilla disciplina, el más largo día de verano le resultó demasiado corto para su favorito entretenimiento, disfrutado junto al espadañoso Lee o al pie de los tentadores laberintos del arroyo de Shawford. Más hermoso que la vida misma, en este dulce libro, los macizos de primaveras y el sombroso sauce, y los frescos prados, donde fluía de cada rincón de su henchido seno, alegre piedad’. Obras completas, I, p. 1183.

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The Compleat Angler, written by Izaac Walton in 1653, is much more than a mere guide to anglers. Charles Lamb recommended it to Coleridge in 1796 stating that: ‘It breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity and simplicity of heart; there are many choice old verses interspersed in it; it would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it’.30 And it was probably Coleridge who, in turn, recommended the book to his very close friend. In the poem devoted to the book, Wordsworth praises how Walton: ‘exhorts | to reverent watching of each still report | That Nature utters from her rural shrine’. (II, p. 398, ll. 4-6) Later, Unamuno recounts how, encouraged by the fact that Izaac Walton’s book had moved Wordsworth’s soul so much, he wrote down the reference of the book with the intention of procuring it. Not in vain, his next and last note in the last page of Wordsworth’s volume of poetry reads: ‘Walton book of ver (see)’. And yet, some years passed before he could get hold of a copy; he received one from an English student called Royall Tyler. Unamuno narrates how the student had drawn attention to the purity and sweetness of the language of Walton’s narration. Meaningfully, Unamuno points out the complete title of the book which includes the term ‘contemplative’, The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, and goes on: ‘Y así, visto el amor contemplativo que Walton profesaba al agua, así me explico la afición que a su librito tuvo aquel patriarca de los lakistas o laguistas, el dulce Wordsworth, el que cantó al río Duddon en treinta y cuatro sonetos imperecederos’. (Obras completas, I, p. 1186) Through Walton’s ‘contemplative love’, Unamuno leads us to Wordsworth’s ‘The River Duddon’, where the ‘still repose, the liquid lapse serene’ of the river provokes powerful emotions in the poet.31 Unamuno again praised this sonnet series in ‘La Flecha’, an essay included in Paisajes (1902): ‘ningún amante de la lírica inglesa deja de visitar, así que se le ofrezca ocasión propicia, aquel río Duddon al que cantó el dulcísimo Wordsworth’. (I, p. 57)32 As Unamuno sees it, the contemplative approach to nature is not a mere physical contact with the phenomenal world through the senses, but from a

30

31 32

Quoted in the introduction to Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (London: Everyman, 1970), p. v. Sonnet XX, l. 4. Unamuno extends the conceit of the river in the following passage: ‘La contemplación del quieto fluir del río nos lava de la sucia costra de los cotidianos afanes, y limpia y monda el alma, respira a sus anchas, por sus poros todos, la serenidad augusta de la naturaleza. [...] ¡Recatada sabiduría la que por el filtro de sutil embebecimiento va posándose en el cauce del río de nuestra alma! En ella se templan las alegrías y se disipan las penas, poniéndose todo de acuerdo con la serenidad de la naturaleza.’ Obras completas, I, p. 1188.

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meeting and fusion of the world and the soul of the artist who has found its inner spirit behind its external formal features: ‘el que ha tomado la vera de las aguas por la escuela de contemplación, se hará manso, y como tal, poseerá la tierra, y ésta será de él’. (Obras completas, I, pp. 1188-9) Earlier, in ‘Puesta del sol’ (1899) he had expressed the same idea: ‘La intensidad y pureza de la visión, penetrándonos por completo y esponjándonos en ella, reducía nuestras almas a contemplación pura’. (I, p. 74) Unamuno views this relation as a continuous vital struggle: ‘Nuestra vida es un continuado combate entre nuestro espíritu, que quiere adueñarse del mundo, hacerle suyo, hacerle él, y el mundo, que quiere apoderarse de nuestro espíritu y hacerle a su vez suyo’. (I, p. 1150) Coleridge also defended this stance in the often quoted lines from ‘Dejection’: ‘we receive but what we give, | And in our life alone does Nature live.’ The Spanish author concluded that the attainment of this relationship was the ultimate goal of art: ‘El fin sublime [del arte] es la contemplación posesiva; el hacerse dueño del mundo comprendiéndolo y sintiéndolo’. (IV, p. 731) Unamuno saw in Wordworth’s ‘Sonnets to the River Duddon’ a perfect example of the movement from the local to the universal through possessive contemplation and, in addition, of the religious nature of the eventual revelations achieved. In the essay devoted to The Compleat Angler he agreed with Wordsworth’s statement that Walton’s work is a sweet book that gives off ‘gladsome piety’.33 He emphasised Walton’s religiousness and noted that: ‘aquí está el toque de la religiosidad de Walton, en que su Dios fue el Dios de la Naturaleza más que el Dios de los hombres’. (I, p. 1191) Unamuno realised this common feature of Walton and Wordsworth; both authors could read the religious messages engraved in nature by God. ‘The River Duddon’ provided the Spanish poet with examples of religious meanings in nature as, for example, sonnet thirty-one, in which the contemplation of the Kirk of Ulpha and the churchyard, located close to the river, leads to thoughts divine: ‘How sweet were leisure! Could it yield no more | Than mid that wavewashed churchyard to recline, | From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine’. (ll. 9-11) Like Wordsworth, Unamuno strongly believed that the countryside is God’s painting, as he writes in ‘Paisaje Teresiano’. ‘El Campo

33

Unamuno praised contemplation in the following passage: ‘Wordsworth dice que del ‘dulce libro’ de Walton se desprende alegre piedad — gladsome piety —, y esto es lo cierto’. Obras completas, I, p. 1190. The Spanish author refers to the following verses by Wordsworth: ‘Fairer than life itself, in this sweet Book, | The cowslip-bank and shady willow-tree; | And the fresh meads — where flowed, from every nook | of his full bosom, gladsome Piety!’. Wordsworth, Poems, II, p. 398, ll. 11-14.

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es una metáfora’.34 Consequently, he says in ‘La Flecha’ that the feelings born out of the contemplation of nature are Christian feelings as well.35 In the introduction — ‘Memoir’ — to Wordsworth’s poetical works, Unamuno marked the following sentence belonging to a letter written by the Lake Poet to Southey: ‘I shall continue to write, with, I trust, the light of Heaven upon me’.36 The Spanish author frequently stressed the piety of the Romantic poet as one of his outstanding virtues. The following excerpt dated 1897, in which Wordsworth’s natural goodness is contrasted with the ‘monstrous’ Byron, is an example: ‘Pero Dios es justo y dispone del tiempo. Así ves que, a medida que baja en Inglaterra el prestigio de aquel monstruoso Byron, sube el del dulce, íntimo, religioso y cristiano Wordsworth. A la larga triunfa el bueno, y del malo el granito de bondad’.37

The Child is the Father of the Man Childhood receives a special treatment in Unamuno’s poetics and literary production. Blanco Aguinaga, in his classic work on the contemplative Unamuno, discusses the importance of the notion of childhood in the development of the Spanish author’s theory of contemplative poetry. 38 He rightly notes that to Unamuno childhood is not just a lost reality; rather, it is the pure view of the world acquired during one’s infancy that always pervades the spirit and must be recalled as the object of poetry. What most interests me for the purposes of the present study is that, as Blanco Aguinaga also observes, every time that Unamuno draws upon this idea, he mentions Wordsworth in whose poems, the Spanish poet writes, there is ‘una larga, entrañable, casi abismática niñez’.39 In fact, Unamuno adopted Wordsworth’s sentence ‘the child is the father of the man’ as a summary of his thought regarding childhood and used it as a recurrent motto. In the essay ‘Sobre la continuidad histórica’ (1913), he wrote: ‘Es más exacto acaso aquello de que the child is the father of the man, el niño es padre del hombre. Y agregamos

34

35

36 37 38 39

See Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922): ‘¿Pero es que el campo mismo, la pintura de Dios, es más que un ramillete de metáforas o toda una metáfora? El universo visible es una metáfora del invisible, del alma, aunque nos parezca al revés’. Obras completas, I, p. 496. ‘El sentimiento de la Naturaleza ¿no es acaso, en rigor, un sentimiento cristiano?’ Obras completas, I, p. 59. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ‘Memoir’, xxxv. Quoted in García Blanco, ‘Poetas ingleses en la obra de Unamuno’, p. 89. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, El Unamuno contemplativo (Barcelona: Laia, 1975), pp. 125-143. Ibid, p. 136.

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lo del poeta Wordsworth: ‘¡Ojalá mis días ligaran unos a otros por natural piedad!’ (Obras completas, IV, pp. 974-975) In this excerpt Unamuno quoted from Wordsworth’s poem ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’ which he translated in September 1930:40 The Child is the father of the man. Traducido de W. Wordsworth Mi corazón salta al ver Arco iris en el cielo; Así cuando vine al suelo, Así hoy al hombre ser; Sea así al envejecer, O antes muera. Padre del hombre es el niño Y mis días yo quisiera Juntar en piadoso escriño. (VI, p. 988)

To the mature Unamuno, as it was to Wordsworth, infancy is a spiritual state close to nature and eternity and constitutes the ability to find out something new and sublime in every single object and sense experience, to disclose the essence of nature, the mystery of life. The Spanish poet concludes his ‘Recuerdos de niñez y mocedad’ (1908) as follows: ‘Mas solo conservando una niñez eterna en el lecho del alma, sobre el cual se precipita y brama el torrente de las impresiones fugitivas, es como se alcanza la verdadera libertad y se puede mirar cara a cara el misterio de la vida’. (Obras completas, VIII, p. 156) It is not difficult to trace the source of this idea; Unamuno marked with three long vertical strokes the following lines of ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 40

Published in Cancionero. Wordsworth’s poem reads: ‘My heart leaps up when I behold | A rainbow in the sky: | So was it when my life began; | So is it now I am a man; | So be it when I shall grow old, | Or let me die! | The Child is father of the Man; | I could wish my days to be | Bound each to each by natural piety’. Wordsworth, Poems, I, p. 522.

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Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is nature’s priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. (I, p. 525, ll.58-77)

A further influence was Wordsworth’s ‘The Excursion’. In ‘Cantos de la noche’ (1898) Unamuno paraphrases and discusses the first verses of this poem as a prelude to his short review of Cándido Rodríguez Pinilla’s collection of poems Cantos de la noche: En su hermoso poema The Excursion nos habla el gran poeta inglés Wordsworth de un niño nacido en una alquería de las colinas de Athol, el pobre y virtuoso hogar, asentado en el declive de un áspero terreno. Apacentó ganado desde los seis años y en los día inclementes del invierno íbase con su zurrón a la espalda a la lejana escuela. Mas una tarde, al volver solitario desde aquel lúgubre recinto a su distante hogar, vio crecer en la oscuridad las colinas, contempló a solas el aparecer de las estrellas sobre su cabeza y atravesó el bosque sin tener junto a sí a quien poder confiar lo que veía. Así se echaron los cimientos de su espíritu. En comunión tal con la naturaleza, y siendo aún un niño, percibió la presencia y el poder de lo grande, y hondos sentimientos imprimieron en su mente grandiosos objetos, con rasgos tan limpios que, yaciendo en ella cual sustancias, hasta parecían entrar en sus corporales sentidos. Recibió un don precioso, porque al crecer en años comparó siempre con estas primeras impresiones sus remembranzas y sus ideas, y, descontento siempre de todo lo turbio, logró una potencia activa de fijar imágenes en sus pintadas líneas hasta que adquiriesen vivez de ensueños. Figurémonos ahora que los ojos del héroe del purísimo poema británico se hubiesen cerrado a la luz al trasponer su infancia el niño, y que llevase éste durante su vida todas las cándidas visiones de su niñez sustanciadas en las entrañas del espíritu y purificadas allí en poético ensueño. Para él sería una verdadera realidad íntima, aquello de que la vida es sueño. (Obras completas, III, p. 1066, my italics)41

The association of nature with childhood, which is central to ‘The Excursion’, is poetically exploited by both British and Spanish authors. The marks in the table of contents of Wordsworth’s volume show Unamuno’s preference for poems where the relationship between nature and childhood is 41

Two years after writing the passage Unamuno composed ‘Al niño enfermo’, included in Poesías, in which the poet addresses a seriously ill boy who is bound to die during his sleep. The pressing need of preserving the infant soul leads the poet to consider early death as the only way to save his soul from the hampering effect of maturity. The pure visions obtained by the infant in communion with nature will thus remain alive in an eternal dream.

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explored. ‘Ruth’ and ‘The Mad Mother’ are devoted to the fate suffered by two children abandoned by their parents. They are symbolically adopted by nature, which turns out to be their surrogate parent. Ruth is said to be ‘an infant of the woods’, while ‘the mad mother’ tells her little baby: ‘we’ll find thy father in the wood’. Nature is then essentially linked with childhood, and the mature poet is able to move to his younger days and recover his spiritual purity by means of the contemplation of nature as in ‘Repentance’ and ‘To a Butterfly’, also highlighted by Unamuno. This notion of childhood became a key element in Unamuno’s poetics. In ‘Recuerdos de niñez y mocedad’, he declared: ‘El niño nace artista y suele dejar de serlo en cuanto se hace hombre. Y si no deja de serlo, es que sigue siendo niño’ (Obras completas, VIII, p. 114); and, accordingly, in ‘Incidentes domésticos IV’ God, the Supreme Artist, is presented as an eternal child.42 Therefore, the ideal poet must be an infant in his soul so that he can enter a state equal to childhood in communion with the tranquility of nature. It is a state of innocence, freshness, and serene vision which is not yet corrupted by experience. In 1908, Unamuno writes: ‘Porque un poeta, ¿qué es sino un hombre que ve el mundo con corazón de niño y cuya mirada infantil, a fuerza de pureza, penetra a las entrañas de las cosas pasaderas y de las permanentes?’ (VIII, p. 963) Hence, he would continuously recall his infancy in a determined attempt to recover purity of vision, a perspective of innocence, and the ability to find eternity in the local.43 I find it necessary to note that William Blake must have also been an important influence on Unamuno’s view of childhood and its relation with nature and poetic geniality. Blake draws upon the Platonic theory of recollection to construct the ideological basis of his Songs of Innocence and Experience. In these poems, as Paley has put it, childhood and adulthood represent two ‘phases in the spiritual development of man and, at the same time perennial ways of looking at the world’.44 Experience represses imagination and creativity. Unamuno declared: ‘La estúpida urbanidad nos ha taponado el alma’ (VIII, p. 116); which is not far from Blake’s image of the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ in the poem ‘London’. Don Miguel was well acquainted with these poems since he also owned and profusely marked two

42

43

44

‘¿Hace acaso otra cosa | el Artista Supremo, | al recrearse, niño eterno, en su obra?’ Obras completas, VI, p. 302. See ‘Alborada espiritual’, where the poet exclaims: ‘Vivas memorias de mi cara infancia | rememberanzas benditas!’. Obras completas, VI, p. 249. M.D. Paley, Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, (London: Prentice Hall, 1969), p. 2.

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different editions of Blake’s poetical works.45 Nonetheless, the admission of the visionary poet’s influence should by no means overshadow Wordsworth’s contribution. In 1928, Unamuno dedicated a poem entitled ‘Wordsworth’ to the Lake Poet and, in particular, to his theory of recollection and his notion of childhood. (VI, p. 988) There is no doubt of Wordsworth’s influence: Cada vez más cercanos Recuerdos de niñez Cada vez más cercana; A las veces es vez. Mi tarde es la mañana, Mañana de una vez; A la rueda jugábamos, La rueda ha de volver. Dame tu manecita, Tú el que se me fue... — Aquí la tienes, hijo, Ya no te soltaré.

The Same Old Romanticism? It is now well established that Spanish poetry took a distinctly new direction during the first decades of the twentieth century. However, discussions on the nature of this new line of poetry and the title that should be assigned to it occupy many scholarly pages even today. Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, who is rightly considered the precursor of this change, did not favour adhering any label to this new view of poetry which he interpreted as the choice of a particular poetic tonality inspired by the old Romantic spirit. He attributed the change to a rebirth of Romanticism: ‘El término modernismo me resulta en realidad tan vago, tan indeterminado e indeciso como el de romanticismo lo era. Es, más que una escuela, una tendencia, y aun mejor una tonalidad. Es el mismo viejo romanticismo que renace’.46 (Obras completas, III, p. 1297) In fact, Unamuno’s revival of Romantic tenets has led some authors to suggest that Romanticism did not reach Spain until the Generation of 98, of which he is a leading proponent. This is, for instance, the case made by E. Inman Fox in Ideología y política en las letras de fin de siglo (1988). To 45

46

Poems of William Blake, ed. by W. B. Yeats (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1905) and The Poetical Works of William Blake (Oxford University Press, 1914). In ‘Fulls de la vida’ (26 March, 1899).

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others, such as Philip W. Silver in Ruina y restitución: Reinterpretación del Romanticismo en España (1996), this renewal of Spanish poetry can be seen as the restitution of early European Romanticism. In any case, what seems indisputable is that Don Miguel found in the British Romantic poets, most significantly in those he termed poetas lakistas, a different poetic proposal from the vacuous, yet pompous, contemporary verse which he so openly challenged. The Spanish author José Ángel Valente affirmed that: ‘la línea que Unamuno se propuso fue simplemente la de abrir para el verso español la posibilidad de alojar un pensamiento poético’.47 Indeed, as has been shown previously, the inclusion of ‘densos pensamientos’ (dense thoughts) was one of the salient features of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems which Unamuno most admired and to which he forcefully adhered. Even more relevant is the nature of the musings behind his verses because they are partially attributable to his engagement with Wordsworth’s Poetical Works. Unamuno’s poems exhibit a stance towards the communion of the poet’s soul with nature and childhood which was foreign to his contemporaries but central in Wordsworth’s thought. The marks and annotations in Unamuno’s copy of Wordsworth prove his attentive reading and deep knowledge of the British poet’s beliefs about the nature of the poetic act. Aside from the aspects mentioned above, it is interesting to underline how greatly the possibility of apprehending the eternal through the temporal that the Romantics offered through their verses appealed to Unamuno. He had been educated in the rationalist and empiricist background of nineteenth-century Spain and suffered a deep spiritual crisis in the 1890s that predisposed him to the Lake Poets and propelled his turn towards idealism. To fight against his destructive anguish before death, the Lake Poets provided him with the possibility of breaking the limits of the tangible world in search of eternity. Unamuno was not only a late fruit of the spirit of the Lake Poets but also the chief precursor of its renewed influence in twentieth century Spain. He was a highly influential force and became the main conduit for the reception of the British Romantics in twentieth-century Spanish literature. Some critics have already defended their presence in Spanish contemporary poetry. Notably, Jordi Doce has traced the pervading Romantic vein in the verses of Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Luis Cernuda, and some essays have been written dealing exclusively with the influence of Wordsworth on Machado and Cernuda.48 Thus, the legacy of William Wordsworth in Spain 47 48

In ‘Luis Cernuda y la poesía de la meditación’. Quoted in Jiménez Heffernan, p. 236. Sally Harvey, ‘La presencia de Wordsworth en la poesía de Antonio Machado’, Antonio Machado hoy. Actas del congreso internacional conmemorativo del cincuentenario de la muerte de Antonio Machado, vol 3 (Sevilla: Alfar, 1990), pp. 45-66; Sonia Santos Vila,

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may have gone far beyond Miguel de Unamuno to color, in the decades that followed, the poetic imagination of some of the most appreciated poets of twentieth-century Spain.

Bibliography Bautista, Francisco, ‘El poeta en su biblioteca: Unamuno y la Biographia Literaria de Coleridge’, Ínsula : Revista de letras y ciencias humanas, 643 (2000), 11-13. Blake, William. Poems of William Blake, ed. by W. B. Yeats (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1905) The Poetical Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914) Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos, El Unamuno contemplativo (Barcelona: Laia, 1975) Darío, Rubén, Obras completas, 22 vols (Madrid: Biblioteca Rubén Darío, 1926) XIII De Quincey, Thomas, Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, ed. by Ernest Rhys (Everyman’s Library: J. M. Dent & Co, 1907) Doce, Jordi, Imán y desafío. Presencia del romanticismo ingles en la poesía española contemporánea (Barcelona: Península, 2005) Earle, Peter G., Unamuno and English Literature (New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1960) Ereño Altuna, José Antonio, ‘Un texto inédito de Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo: Los arribes del Duero (1898)’, in Unamuno y Europa. Nuevos ensayos y viejos textos, ed. by Pedro Ribas (Madrid: Cuaderno Gris, 2002) Flores Moreno, Cristina, ‘‘‘That Marvellous Coleridge’: The Influence of S. T. Coleridge’s Poetry and Poetics in Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)’, Coleridge Bulletin NS, 32 (2008), 41-47. ——, ‘Nature Imagined in S. T. Coleridge’s Meditative Poems and Miguel de Unamuno’s Poesías: A Study on Reception’, Journal of English Studies, 5 (2009), in press. García Blanco, Manuel, ‘Poetas ingleses en la obra de Unamuno’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 36 (1959), 88-106.

‘Wordsworth visto por Cernuda’, Nostalgia de una patria imposible. Estudios sobre la obra de Luis Cernuda, ed. by J. Matas, J.E. Martínez y J. M. Trabado (Madrid: Akal, 2005), pp. 587-597.

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——, ‘Unamuno y la cultura inglesa’, Filología Moderna, 19-20 (1965), 25-157. ——, Don Miguel de Unamuno y sus poesías: estudio y antología de poemas inéditos o no incluidos en sus libros (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1954) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by E. L Griggs, 6 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) Harvey, Sally, ‘La presencia de Wordsworth en la poesía de Antonio Machado’, Antonio Machado hoy. Actas del congreso internacional conmemorativo del cincuentenario de la muerte de Antonio Machado, 3 vols (Sevilla: Alfar, 1990) Imizcoz Beunza, Teresa, La teoría poética de Miguel de Unamuno (Pamplona: Eunsa, 1996) Inman Fox, E., Ideología y política en las letras de fin de siglo (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1988) Jiménez Heffernan, Julián, La palabra emplazada: Meditación y Contemplación de Herbert a Valente (Córdoba: Servicio de publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba, 1998) Paley, M.D., Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Songs of Innocence and Experience (London: Prentice Hall, 1969) Perojo Arronte, María Eugenia, ‘A Path for Literary Change: The Spanish Break with Tradition and the Role of Coleridge’s Poetry and Poetics in Twentieth-Century Spain’, in The Reception of Coleridge in Europe, ed. by Elinor Shaffer and E. Zuccato (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 167-196. Santos Vila, Sonia, ‘Wordsworth visto por Cernuda’, in Nostalgia de una patria imposible. Estudios sobre la obra de Luis Cernuda, ed. by J. Matas, J.E. Martínez and J. M. Trabado (Madrid: Akal, 2005) Silver, Philip W., Ruina y restitución. Reinterpretación del Romanticismo en España (Madrid: Cátedra, 1996) Unamuno, Miguel de, Obras completas (Madrid: Escelicer, 1969) ——, ‘Unamuno en sus cartas’, in Ensayos, (Madrid: Aguilar, 1951), II. Walton, Izaak, The Compleat Angler (London; Everyman, 1970) Wordworth, William, Poems, ed. by John O. Hayden, 2 vols (London: Penguin, 1977) Wordsworth, W. & Coleridge, S. T., Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1998) Yndurain, Francisco, ‘Unamuno en su poética y como poeta’, in Miguel de Unamuno, ed. by Antonio Sanchez Barbudo (Madrid: Taurus, 1974)

PART III

Vistas and Extensions

Jeffrey Scraba

‘Dear Old Romantic Spain’: Washington Irving Imagines Andalucía Of all the English and American Romantic writers on Andalucía and the Alhambra, Washington Irving remains most closely associated with this region in the twenty-first century. This essay seeks to explain his enduring popularity from two interrelated perspectives: Irving’s strategies for integrating his personae into tales and legends about Andalucía, and his meditations on how the past is understood and represented. I argue that in The Alhambra, Irving uses his persona Geoffrey Crayon to develop a tension between naïve indulgence in the romanticization of a place and ironic reflection on the consequences of this indulgence. Crayon’s comprehension and representation of Andalucía is mediated through three important texts. In using Don Quixote as a guide to his travels, Crayon demonstrates how our experiences of unknown places are necessarily mediated through our narrative knowledge. By invoking Irving’s previous work on Andalucía, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, Crayon reminds his reader of the partiality of all versions of the past. Finally, by absorbing and retransmitting local legends told by the inhabitants of the Alhambra, Crayon manages both to explore the workings of cultural memory and to inscribe Irving’s texts into the cultural memory of Andalucía.

If you should find yourself researching a trip to Andalucía on the Internet, chances are that you will run across the name of Washington Irving. For example, on the official website of the Alhambra, under a prominently featured link labeled ‘Alhambra Legends’, you will find a brief biography of Irving, followed by a number of synopses of sketches from his famous 1832 collection, The Alhambra.1 While the practical arrangements for your visit to the monument can be taken care of by the other links on alhambra.org, Irving is given responsibility for the romantic anticipation of your journey.2 Irving’s Alhambra happily lends itself to the service of travel promotion, since it takes the form of a virtual tour of the site: Irving’s narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, describes important rooms in the Nasrid Palace (in sketches entitled, for example, ‘Panorama from the Tower of Comares,’ ‘The Court of Lions,’ and ‘The Tower of Las Infantas’) and relates anecdotes of the Moorish past associated with those rooms. Irving’s Alhambra is thus devoted not only to illustrating the architectural splendors of the Palace, but also to permeating 1

2

‘Alhambra Legends’, in Alhambra.com [accessed 27 October 2008.] I will be using the term ‘romantic’ in both its general sense (as sentimentalization or idealism) and its historically specific sense (as Romanticism); when I intend the latter, I will capitalize ‘Romantic’.

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the site with the stories of its own romantic past. The website deliberately invests the physical spaces of the Alhambra with historical and legendary meaning, meaning which is ultimately derived from Irving’s attempt to do the same thing in The Alhambra. When you actually arrive at the Alhambra, you will encounter Irving at every turn. Tourist-oriented bookshops in and around Granada prominently feature Irving’s Alhambra translated into numerous languages.3 (More puzzlingly, as I will elaborate below, Irving’s 1829 A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada is marketed to the visitor as an authoritative history of the region.)4 The English-language audio guide to the Alhambra is supposed to be narrated by him, so you have the opportunity to experience the ghosts of the region accompanied by the ghost of Irving. The Governor’s quarters in the Nasrid Palace have been renamed the ‘Washington Irving Apartments’ to commemorate his 1829 stay. A peek into these rooms is an important feature of the standard tour, and the Irving Apartments have recently been opened to visitors on special occasions. Irving seems to have been crucially involved in developing the image of the Alhambra in the Romantic imagination, and now he has himself become an integral aspect of that image. Just as Irving reanimates the Garden of Lindaraxa or the Court of Lions with their most famous historical figures, so the image of Irving himself has been installed in the Palace. Irving, in other words, is now one of the historical and legendary figures who haunt the Alhambra. As Diego Saglia has documented, the Alhambra and its legends were favorite subjects of famous and lesser-known British Romantic writers, especially during and following the Peninsular War (1808-14).5 So what accounts for the particular and enduring popularity of Irving’s Spanish works nearly two hundred years after their publications? Instead of Felicia Hemans or Joanna Baillie, why does Irving still live in the Alhambra? In what follows, I will suggest a number of ways in which Irving manages to weave his legends and his own image into the fabric of cultural memory. First, as I have already suggested, Irving integrates his stories with depictions of the 3

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5

Most modern editions of The Alhambra are based on Irving’s final revision of 1851, which added new material to and rearranged and restructured original sketches from the 1832 text. Though I rely on the 1851 text for references, nearly all of the passages I discuss were part of the original publication. Washington Irving, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, From the MSS. of Fray Antonio Agapida, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1829) See Diego Saglia, ‘The Exotic Politics of the Domestic: The Alhambra as Symbolic Place in British Romantic Poetry’, Comparative Literature Studies, 34.3 (1997), 197-225; and ‘The Moor's Last Sigh: Spanish-Moorish Exoticism and the Gender of History in British Romantic Poetry’, Journal of English Studies (Logroño, Spain), 3 (2001-2002), 193-215.

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places in which they happened: rather than using Andalucía as an exotic backdrop for scenes of Orientalist exoticism, Irving tries to situate his reader in the physical spaces where these scenes developed. Second, Irving writes his personae into these scenes, intimately associating tale, teller, and place. Third, Irving’s Spanish writings suggest that the places they describe have significance only insofar as we historicize them through narrative. Finally, Irving mounts a complex critique of this historicization in The Alhambra and A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, emphasizing that versions of the past are perceived and narrated from interested subject positions.

Making the Monument Since Irving’s Alhambra generally takes the form of an elaborate guidebook and describes a region then little visited by travelers, it makes sense that it would appeal to his contemporaries. As Barbara Nunges notes, the ‘many chapters which describe the Palace [...] still work as a perfect Baedeker for modern visitors’.6 By all accounts, Irving’s Alhambra was wildly successful in inspiring tourists to visit the monument, in turn confirming the Spanish government in its plans to restore the site.7 As Pere Gifra-Adroher asserts, Irving’s work was a major impetus in the ‘discovery’ of Spain by Western (and particularly American) tourists, and his Spanish works (including Legends of the Conquest of Spain in 1835) created prototypes for the depiction of Spain that have endured since the nineteenth century.8 As the website for the tourist organization andalucia.com insists, Irving was ‘largely responsible’ for creating ‘the Romantic image of Al-Andalus which persists to this day’.9 While Irving’s works were undoubtedly instrumental in the preservation and restoration of the Alhambra, what I am interested in here is the perception that Irving created indelible images of romantic Andalucía for 6

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Barbara Nunges, ‘Paradise Regained: Washington Irving’s Mythological Spain’, in America and the Mediterranean: AISNA, Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Biennial International Conference, Genova, November 8-11, 2001, ed. by Massimo Bacigalupo and Pierangelo Castagneto (Turin: Otto editore, 2003), pp. 333-42 (p. 338). The first annual subvention for the Alhambra’s preservation was decreed by King Ferdinand in 1830, the year after Irving’s stay in the monument. See Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), I, p. 361. Pere Gifra-Adoherer, Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 15-28. ‘People: Washington Irving’, in Andalucia.com [accessed 27 October 2008]

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the visitor to Spain. Through their currency in the tourist market, such perceptions continue to shape and reshape the spaces of southern Spain. Of course, there are pragmatic economic reasons for Irving’s semilegendary status in Andalucía: people appreciate the profits they have earned from the influx of tourists inspired by his works. But in many ways, Irving’s Alhambra deliberately creates its own reception: not only does it coach readers on a proper appreciation of the site, but it also makes Irving himself a vital figure in that appreciation. Unlike prior English or American writers on Spain, Irving positions himself as a tourist of the sites he describes and an antiquarian of the stories he relates; the reader of his texts is invited to explore place and time along with the narrator. Irving thus self-consciously integrates his experiences with the places and histories he is describing, essentially installing himself in the Washington Irving Apartments before the Spanish government has a chance to do so. Irving’s strategies for claiming Andalucía as his own imaginative territory have much to teach us about place, tourism, and identity in the Romantic period. One of the most important of these strategies is Irving’s use of his bythen famous persona, Geoffrey Crayon, as the narrator of The Alhambra. Elaborating an irony first developed in The Sketch Book over a decade earlier, The Alhambra develops a tension between Crayon’s indulgence in romantic reverie and Irving’s understanding that this imaginative attitude is an enabling fiction.10 Crayon’s Romantic experiences, we might say, are tempered by Irving’s Romantic irony. This tension between naïve narrator and self-conscious author is perhaps most clearly seen in the text’s celebration of the Alhambra as absolutely central to tourist culture in Europe. In his initial description, Crayon implies that the Alhambra is a virtual Mecca for a continual throng of tourists: ‘To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparably intertwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is as much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems’.11 But when Irving was staying in the Alhambra in 1829, as the text also describes, the monument was neglected and dilapidated, far off the beaten track of both the Grand Tour and the emerging middle-class excursion. Aside from Irving and his friend Prince Dolgorouki, no foreign tourists visited the Alhambra during Irving’s four-month stay. The 10

11

The failure to recognize this duality of writer/persona, a duality common to nearly all of Irving’s major work, has resulted in the widespread misreading of Irving’s work as naïve, provincial, myopic, and/or hopelessly nostalgic. My essay aims to correct some of these misreadings. Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra (New York: Library of America, 1991), p. 752. Further page references to The Alhambra will be given in parentheses within the text.

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Alhambra should be an object of devotion to travelers, however, and Crayon’s text aims to make it so. In the meantime, Crayon’s devotion to the ruins is made to stand in for and anticipate more general worship. In the sketches that describe the rooms of the palace and the stories associated with them, Crayon assumes that the Alhambra has an established tradition of historical and romantic association, even as the text works to establish that tradition by adapting and elaborating stories Irving has heard. Crayon’s stories of the Moorish past are produced concurrently with the accounts of his own experiences: in terms of cultural memory, Geoffrey Crayon and his Moorish occupants of the Alhambra belong to the same historical moment. Since Crayon and figures like Boabdil, last of the Nasrid rulers, come to inhabit the palace at the same time and in the same text, it stands to reason that they now imaginatively occupy the Alhambra together. In a move typical of Romantic nostalgia, seen in projects from ballad collections to museums, Irving invents the traditions of the Alhambra even as he claims to preserve them. Crayon describes the experience of finally seeing the places in the Alhambra that he has so long imagined, places that are in the process of becoming historically and romantically resonant (at least in the English-speaking world) through his descriptions of them. This circular structure of satisfying and creating expectation works on the reader in two consonant ways: she is persuaded that the Alhambra has a vital place in local and cosmopolitan cultural memory and she desires to see the Alhambra for herself in order to realize the experiences she imagines through reading Irving’s text. Because subsequent tourists seek to emulate his experiences, Irving becomes a figure almost as important to visiting the Alhambra as characters from the legends he supposedly retells. While The Alhambra self-reflexively produces the Alhambra as a romantic site, Irving and his avatar Crayon merge into the archetypal Romantic tourist, a figure whose responsiveness to aesthetic experience, antiquarian veneration for ruins of the past, and hunger for local lore models an ideal relationship to the historical site. Writers such as George Dekker and James Buzard have established that European tourism following the defeat of Napoleon was marked by a number of fundamental tensions.12 Romantic tourists were both serious and ironic in their approach to the historical site: they combined the whimsical and the solemn, play and piety, fancy and fact. At once attentive to history and captivated by fiction, invested in accurate perception and interested in what Dekker calls ‘editing or framing their 12

See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and George Dekker, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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experience’, Romantic tourists combined reverence for monumental sites with imaginative indulgence.13 As Crayon venerates the Alhambra and Irving freely adapts history to his own purposes, we see this dynamic at work. Using Irving’s Alhambra as a guide to the monument and thus following in Crayon’s footsteps, later tourists iterate this process: they are at once in search of authentic experiences and picturesque scenes and conscious of their agency in producing those experiences and scenes.

On the Road with Don Quixote This Romantic ritual of touring southern Spain has been institutionalized in a number of ways, but nowhere more obviously than by El Legado Andalusí (The Legend of Al-Andalus), ‘an organization which promotes the knowledge of Andalusia’s Moorish past’.14 Celebrating Irving’s influence in the region, El Legado Andalusí has developed an itinerary called ‘La Ruta de Washington Irving’: ‘Esta ruta recorre los pasos que en 1829 siguió el escritor romántico y diplomático norteamericano Washington Irving’ (‘This route retraces the steps followed by the Romantic writer and U.S. diplomat Washington Irving in 1829’). According to the website, ‘el itinerario atraviesa tierras cargadas de una extraordinaria riqueza paisajística y monumental, parajes, pueblos y ciudades repletas de evocaciones históricas, legendarias y literarias’ (‘the route runs through a land uncommonly rich in landscapes and monumental sites, visiting places, villages and cities replete with historical, literary and legendary associations’).15 This route commemorates and ritualizes Irving’s journey from Seville to Granada, which is described in the opening chapter of The Alhambra, ‘The Journey’. Like Crayon’s experiences at the Nasrid palace, this journey has become a literary tourist landscape, an expedition to read about and then to live through for oneself. Irving’s description of his journey to the Alhambra along what will become ‘The Washington Irving Route’ has frequently been taken (and not only by tourist groups) as a simple sentimentalization of the area and of his experience. Gifra-Adroher, for example, reads ‘The Journey’ not only as an ‘idealization of the land and the people of Spain’, but also as ‘an eulogy of 13 14

15

Dekker, p. 5. ‘Tales of Andalusia’, in An Andalusian Experience [accessed 27 October 2008] ‘Ruta de Washington Irving’, in Las Rutas del Legado Andalusí [accessed 27 October 2008]. My translation.

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rough traveling’ constituting an early travel-writing example of ‘the glorification of manhood’; to Gifra-Adroher, Irving demonstrates a ‘reactionary rather than a radical romanticism [...] He chose to ignore [contemporaneous problems] by constructing Spain in terms of a grandiose medieval past bound to a permanently primitive present peopled with tattered hidalgos in the timeless setting of the Alhambra’.16 As with Gifra-Adroher’s ambivalent assessment, Irving has been alternately praised and blamed for his portrayal of southern Spain as a land of ancient traditions and pre-modern behavior and for his description of his journey as a ramble into a realm of living legends. Complaining of Irving’s mannered and antiquated style, Nunges claims that ‘Irving’s landscapes are more symbolic than real; his descriptive writing is never inspired by nature, but rather trimmed to fit heightened contrasts; his characters are confined to predictable stereotypes; his Spain is, in a word, a mythological country, modeled on pictorial or literary codes’.17 Nunges’ assessment is accurate, but her criticism is misplaced: the textual composition of the real is precisely Irving’s point. Throughout his oeuvre, Irving suggests that places are constituted by the stories told about them; The Alhambra enacts the processes through which places accrue ‘historical, literary and legendary associations’. At the same time, through the implicit contrast between Crayon and Irving, The Alhambra reveals this process at work: ‘The Journey’, in particular, foregrounds the activity of translating between actual and textual experience. Because he wants to demonstrate that we experience places through the lens of our reading, Irving self-consciously and ironically romanticizes Andalucía. In the picturesque scenes and romantic vignettes of ‘The Journey’, Irving does reproduce a number of stereotypes of exotic Spain. For example, Crayon celebrates the ‘proud, hardy, frugal, and abstemious Spaniard’ along with the ‘sublimity’ of the ‘sternly simple features of the Spanish landscape’. (p. 726) He describes the ‘frank, manly, and courteous’ muleteer as the embodiment of the Andalusian countryside. (p. 727) The Moorish influences, impromptu character, and legendary local subject matter of the muleteer’s songs make them, for Crayon, ideal supplements to his experience of the landscape (and vice-versa): ‘There is something wildly pleasing in listening to these ditties among the rude and lonely scenes they illustrate; accompanied, as they are, by the occasional jingle of the mule-bell’. (pp. 727-28) Just as Crayon attempts to do in his own evocations of Spanish history, the songs of the Andalusian countryside infuse place with cultural memory. Crayon, his companion, and their guide see mediaeval ruins, meet 16 17

Gifra-Adroher, pp. 134, 123. Nunges, p. 337.

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wise beggars, terrify themselves with the spectacle of roaming Andalusian bulls, traverse the ‘haunts of banditti’, and enjoy flamenco at a rustic inn. In describing La Ruta de Washington Irving, the website An Andalusian Experience comments that ‘[Irving’s] journey was long and perilous, through territory infested with bandits. At night, Irving stayed at lowly village inns although the author, a romantic to the end, remarked that in Andalusia “the most miserable inn is as full of adventure as an enchanted castle”’.18 Fortunately, as the website hastens to add, ‘[f]or today’s traveler the choice is somewhat broader. Along the route there are comfortable accommodations in every price range’.19 While you are sure to find better food and shelter than Irving did, El Legado Andalusí implies that Irving (or Crayon) has invested southern Spain with adventure and enchantment that still await your discovery. Taken straight, Crayon’s journey appears to illustrate the reflexive relativism of Romantic historicism, in which the ‘spirit’ of a ‘civilized’ age and culture is defined against the ‘spirit’ of a ‘primitive’ culture: just like the twenty-first-century tourist, Crayon appears to travel from modernity into a realm of tradition, legend, and simple values. But Irving gives his reader a number of signals that this implicit contrast — between cosmopolitan and provincial, between modernity and tradition, between advanced and primitive cultures — should not be taken at face value. Perhaps the most important of these clues is Crayon’s predilection for using Don Quixote as a textual guide to his experiences. For example, Crayon transforms his guide to Granada into Don Quixote’s squire: this guide is ‘a faithful, cheery, kind-hearted creature, as full of saws and proverbs as that miracle of squires, the renowned Sancho himself, whose name, by the by, we bestowed upon him’. (p. 730) The guide is not simply like Sancho, he is forced to play Sancho to Crayon’s Don Quixote, and this conceit sustains the group throughout their journey. According to Crayon, the guide accepts his role with particular gusto. When ‘Sancho’ is reunited with Crayon and his companion after losing track of them in the ‘wild mountain place’ of Loxa, he exclaims: ‘“Ah, señores, [...] el pobre Sancho no es nada sin Don Quixote” (Ah, señors, poor Sancho is nothing without Don Quixote)’. (p. 744) Accompanied by their literary squire, Crayon and his companion determine to travel with ‘an ample stock of good humor and a genuine disposition to be pleased [...] taking things as we found them, rough or smooth, and mingling with all classes and conditions in a kind of vagabond companionship’. (p. 730) ‘With such disposition and determination,’ insists Crayon, the country becomes ‘dear old 18

19

‘Tales of Andalusia’, in An Andalusian Experience [accessed 28 October 2008] Ibid.

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romantic Spain,’ and inns are transformed into enchanted castles. (p. 730, 731) So when a simple wedding charivari wakes him one night, Crayon practically becomes Don Quixote: ‘I was aroused by a horrid din and uproar, that might have confounded the hero of La Mancha himself whose experience of Spanish inns was a continual uproar. It seemed for a moment as if the Moors were once more breaking into the town’. (p. 746) For Crayon, traveling through Spain in the proper manner is a thus a form of quixotism, a reading of reality through literature. Like his description of the Alhambra as tourist Mecca, Crayon’s playacting with the characters of Don Quixote encodes an ironic analysis of tourism, place, and history. Crayon may be read as naïve in his own adoption of the identity of Don Quixote, especially when he insists that ‘many of the common people of Spain’ firmly believe Don Quixote ‘to be a true history’. (p. 736) But Irving is mounting a complex critique of the Romantic imagination through the dynamics of Cervantes’ novel. Though Irving does indeed mean to romanticize the land and people of southern Spain, he is explicitly doing so under the banner of Crayon as Don Quixote. One could further argue that the whole enterprise of The Alhambra, beginning with ‘The Journey’, is technically an exercise in quixotism. In the midst of his descriptions of the people and places he encounters, Crayon continually reverts to the past as it has been textually represented, as in this typical example: ‘In the wild passes of these mountains the sight of walled towns and villages, built like eagle’s nests among the cliffs, and surrounded by Moorish battlements, or of ruined watchtowers perched on lofty peaks, carries the mind back to the chivalric days of Christian and Moslem warfare, and to the romantic struggle for the conquest of Granada’. (p. 728) Crayon does not quite mean to ride into the vega of Granada, but into the past of his literary imagination. Like Don Quixote, Crayon everywhere discovers evidence that reality corresponds to the books he has read. Just as Don Quixote’s reading allows him to transform seventeenth-century La Mancha into a mediaeval landscape, so Crayon’s reading allows him to see nineteenth-century Andalucía as ‘dear old romantic Spain’ and to imagine inns as enchanted castles. When tourists use Irving’s Alhambra as a guide to their own experiences of southern Spain, they iterate Crayon’s own suspect reading of Andalucía through Don Quixote and Don Quixote’s own suspect reading of Spain through chivalric romance.

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Between History and Romance Don Quixote, of course, is not simply a novel about a deluded middle-aged man. In Don Quixote’s desire to remake the world along the lines of his anachronistic ideals, readers have seen much to admire and even to emulate. More significantly, Don Quixote’s re-enchantment of the world does in fact work to transform La Mancha in particular ways. The second part of Cervantes’ novel anticipates the effects of Don Quixote on the world it describes: characters in this world, most notably the Duke and Duchess, do in fact believe the first part of Don Quixote to be a true history and act accordingly. And generations of travelers, long before and long after Crayon, have happily followed the route of Don Quixote while trying to imagine themselves in the pages of the novel.20 Similarly, when one visits the Alhambra accompanied by the book or the voice of Washington Irving, one tries to reanimate the space with the writer and his characters. One might say that the literary-historical site is a necessarily quixotic space, produced anew each time a visitor reenacts Crayon’s (or Don Quixote’s) experiences. Like other Romantic tourists from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, and like Don Quixote himself, Crayon makes his journey meaningful through memory, imagination, and textual precedent. As Crayon himself puts it, ‘there is a romance about all the recollections of the Peninsula dear to the imagination’. (p. 729) Through his descriptions and tales in The Alhambra, Irving tries to integrate the functions of romance, recollection, and imagination in making the Alhambra a significant and signifying space. In ‘The Journey’, this combination of story, memory, and fancy reaches its acme when Crayon reaches Antiquera [sic], where he is pleased to find that ‘old usages’ give ‘[e]very thing in this venerable city’ a ‘decidedly Spanish stamp’. (p. 737) Crayon is even happier in the ruins of the old Moorish castle which lie outside of the city: here he ‘enjoy[s] a grand and varied landscape, beautiful in itself, and full of storied and romantic associations; for [he is] now in the very heart of the country famous for the chivalrous contests between Moor and Christian’. (p. 738) From his perspective on the top of a ‘crumbling tower’, Crayon can view ‘the old warrior city so often mentioned in chronicle and ballad’: the mountains of Málaga, renowned for the ‘lamentable massacre [...] [which] laid all Andalusia in 20

The most recent and ambitious effort to formalize ‘La Ruta de Don Quixote’ was made by the Castilla-La Mancha government, which established ‘the longest green tourism route in Europe’ to commemorate the fourth centenary of Don Quixote in 2005. See ‘The Don Quixote Route: A Place for Adventure’, in Quixote: IV Centenario [accessed 31 October 2008]

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mourning’; the famous vega; and the Rock of the Lovers, known for the suicide of the daughter of the alcayde and her lover. (p. 738) What makes this tourist experience (and others like it) particularly quixotic is that these scenes and stories have recently been recalled to public memory by a popular romantic history: A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, by another of Irving’s personae, Fray Antonio Agapida. While the Reconquista was certainly a popular subject of chronicle and ballad (not to mention Romantic poetry), Crayon is here describing places and events just brought to public attention by Irving’s own Chronicle, published just a month before the adventure undertaken in May 1829 and described in ‘The Journey’.21 And though it is not obvious from the descriptions in ‘The Journey’, which represents the landscape and monuments of Andalucía as freshly perceived by Crayon, Irving is in fact also remembering his first Andalusian journey of the spring of 1828: about a year before the trip described in The Alhambra, Irving spent ten days in and around the Alhambra and explored many of the sites depicted in the Chronicle, including the mountains of Málaga depicted here. Not only does this reflection on the romantic history of the Montes de Málaga prepare the reader for Crayon’s romanticization of the Alhambra, but it also functions as an advertisement for Irving’s own account of the ‘chivalrous contests between Moor and Christian.’ Both anticipating the reception of his current book and reflecting on the reception of his last one, Irving/Crayon here becomes a literary tourist of his own work. As when Don Quixote encounters readers of Don Quixote in Part II of Cervantes’ novel, distinctions between the world Crayon actually experiences and the world produced through textual representations begin to break down. But by dwelling on Crayon’s experience of actually seeing the places just made historically and romantically resonant by Irving’s Chronicle, Irving manages to dramatize how succeeding tourists should read and use his Alhambra as guide to place and experience. Irving’s multilayered representation of the legendary past of Andalucía becomes even more complex when one looks into his earlier historical work. A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada is still a very popular book in Andalucía: translated into at least a dozen languages, it is featured prominently, along with The Alhambra, in gift and book shops in and around Granada. Oleg Grabar’s popular architectural study, also marketed to Andalusian travelers, begins with a passage from Irving’s Chronicle to illustrate how ‘the Alhambra penetrated into romantic and popular 21

A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada was published in April 1829 in Philadelphia by Carey and Lea and in May 1829 in London by John Murray.

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imagination as Spain became the most accessible country to French literati or English aristocrats in search of the picturesque’.22 But unwitting tourists who buy Irving’s book must be deeply puzzled: the Chronicle is likely the oddest English-language book ever marketed as a tourist primer. In order to tell the story of the defeat of the Nasrid Kingdom, Irving adopted a peculiar conceit: the history is narrated by the fictional sixteenth-century chronicler Fray Antonio Agapida, a zealous and xenophobic Catholic monk. While Irving’s Chronicle does relate the most important events of the war between the Moors and the Spaniards, the history is told from the perspective of a narrator blatantly biased toward los Reyes Católicos. A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada is pointedly history told by the victors: in adopting Agapida as his historian, Irving depicts how contemporary Catholic chroniclers understood the Reconquista as a manifestation of God punishing the heathen. While it is not my purpose here to address the events related in Irving’s Chronicle, the structure of this text helps us to understand Irving’s ideas about how the past is represented. The ironic relationship between Irving and Agapida, like the ironic relationship between Irving and Crayon, emphasizes that all stories about the past are partial, in the senses both of ‘partisan’ and of ‘incomplete’. If Geoffrey Crayon is a figure allowed to indulge in Romantic reverie over the past, Fray Antonio Agapida is a figure allowed to understand the past through the Christian ideology of chivalric romance. As he wrote to his friend Colonel Aspinwall, Irving intended his Chronicle to be an innovative type of text: ‘The Chronicle, I am aware, is something of an experiment [...] I have made a work out of old chronicles, embellished, as well as I am able, by the imagination, and adapted to the romantic taste of the day — something that was to be between a history and a romance’.23 Irving’s claims here partake of the ambiguity that characterizes the Chronicle generally: his work mediates not only between romance and history, but also between the romantic taste of the sixteenth century and the romantic taste of the nineteenth. The Chronicle is positioned, in other words, between highmediaeval chivalric romance and Romanticism; history, for Irving, is produced through the commerce between the two, and Fray Antonio Agapida is the tool through which this dynamic is set in motion. The Chronicle is indeed made ‘out of old chronicles’: Irving spent considerable time and effort researching his work in Spanish archives. Comparing Irving’s Chronicle with the standard La Historia de España by Modesto Lafuente, ‘who was writing while Irving was in Spain and who used 22 23

Oleg Grabar, The Alhambra (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 18. Quoted in Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), I, 344.

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the very sources to which Irving had access’, Louise Hoffman has shown that Irving’s text accurately recounts the events of the war.24 The reader’s first clue that Irving’s Chronicle is an unusual sort of experiment, however, comes with the introduction of Agapida. The unnamed editor-narrator of the work explains that he has pieced together various ‘disjointed fragments’ of Agapida’s manuscripts, which have been discovered in convents and monasteries throughout Spain.25 Although it is almost immediately apparent that Agapida is fictional, the narrator ironically insists on the verification of his existence. (One might be reminded here of the relationship between ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ as narrator and Cide Hamete Benengeli as historian in Don Quixote.) Though Agapida’s name is ‘not to be found in any of the catalogues of Spanish authors’, the narrator assures us of the reliability of his accounts: ‘[h]e evidently was deeply and accurately informed of the particulars of the wars between his countrymen and the Moors, a tract of history but too much overgrown with the weeds of fable’. (p. vi) The narrator makes the implicit and circular claim that his narrative is to be trusted insofar as it relies on Agapida, and the dubious reader can ascertain the text’s faithfulness to these fragments by checking them herself, as they are preserved in the library of the Escorial. (p. vii) While Irving ironically suggests that Crayon’s romantic visions of Andalucía are in their own way authentic, here he ironically suggests that Agapida’s attempts to write accurate history should be ranked with the weeds of fable. In order to supplement and substantiate Agapida’s manuscripts, the narrator intimates that he will draw on recognized authorities, and the text is filled with footnotes to published sources. While the account of the wars presented in the text is broadly accurate, these footnotes are a curious mixture of actual references to a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts — including a relatively modern history by Juan de Mariana (1592-1605), a late mediaeval chronicle by Hernando del Pulgar (1565), and the famous early historical novel Guerras civiles de Granada (1595) by Ginés Pérez de Hita — and sources, like Agapida, invented by Irving. Through this mix of fact and fiction even in the scholarly apparatus of his text, Irving tries to remind the reader to be skeptical about newly emerging practices of historical documentation. Also, in case the reader is doubtful about the tone of the 24

25

Louise Hoffman, ‘Irving’s Use of Spanish Sources in the Conquest of Granada’, Hispania: A Journal Devoted to the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese, 28.4 (Nov. 1945), pp. 48398 (p. 483). Washington Irving, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, From the MSS. of Fray Antonio Agapida, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1829), I, p. v. Further page references to A Chronicle will be given in parentheses within the text.

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introduction, the narrator compounds Agapida’s piety with explanatory extracts from historical sources. By selecting provocative statements from celebrated historians to complement his account of Agapida’s manuscripts, Irving also forces his reader to be conscious of the ideological assumptions of recognized authorities. For example, the history proper is prefaced by comments from Esteban de Garibay’s Los Quarenta Libros del Compendio Historial (1556-66) that the Reconquista was a ‘special act of divine clemency toward the Moors’ and Juan de Mariana’s Historiae de rebus Hispaniae (1592) that the ‘past domination of the Moors [was] a scourge inflicted on the Spanish nation for its iniquities, but the triumphant war with Granada [was] the reward of heaven for [Spain’s] great act of propitiation in establishing the glorious tribunal of the Inquisition!’ (p. viii) We can see here that the parodic scope of A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada is wide, taking in not only partisan Catholic chronicles, but also respected modern histories. Rather than simply impugning particular Catholic chronicles produced under the shadow of the Inquisition, a task all too easy in the Englishspeaking world of the early nineteenth century, Irving attempted something more complex in his Chronicle. By intensifying and parodying the style of ‘good old orthodox chroniclers, who recorded with such pious exultation the united triumphs of the cross and the sword’, Irving compels his readers to recognize the layers of romance that make up the substance of history. (p. vi) For sixteenth-century chroniclers, the military campaigns of Ferdinand were a romance of Crusade: God, through his chosen Christian warriors, scourged the infidel and manifested his glory. The romance of Crusade also permeates the tissue of actual event: as earlier chroniclers traveled with the Spanish forces to record their exploits, the cavaliers must have understood their actions, at least in part, through the narrative structures of Christian ideology. Nineteenth-century readers, like Irving himself, are drawn to the subject of the conquest of Granada as a sort of Romantic pageant: ancient castles, sublime precipices, dark desires of revenge, and the ‘last sigh’ of Boabdil as he takes his final view of Granada. The burden of the Chronicle, like the burden of The Alhambra, is to implicate the later type of romance in the earlier, to show that history is a kind of palimpsest of romantic modes of knowledge. Without discounting the actuality of events, and without abandoning claims to recover the truth of history, the Chronicle begins by emphasizing that it is only by working through partial and problematic accounts of the past that the past can be represented. As the close of the introduction insists, the Conquest will also be a journey taken along with Agapida, an exploration of the intentions and explanations provided by the historians of late mediaeval Spain: ‘we trust we

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have said enough to engage the Christian reader to follow us into the field, and to stand by us to the very issue of the encounter’. (p. ix) In order to understand the events of the war, the reader must approach the material as if it fits the pattern of the Crusades; in order to understand the manuscript history of the war, the reader must approach the task of interpretation as if it were a sort of Crusade. Of course, the comic tone here emphasizes that this task should be approached reflexively, that participating in the ‘encounter’ involves understanding how and why the archives have been compiled. In an age of post-Enlightenment historicism, with its claims to objectivity, connections to anthropology, and moves toward secularism, nineteenthcentury readers were meant to distrust Agapida’s partisan interest in the narrative and his providential explanatory framework. If Arabic histories were inaccessible or ignored, however, then readers — like Irving himself — had no information about the war for Granada that was not dependent on Agapida and other chroniclers of his ilk. Since Irving’s Chronicle presents us with a sort of redactor (like ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ as compiler of Don Quixote) who invests his authority in the authenticity of Agapida, the target of Irving’s irony is both easy and difficult to place. The narrator of the Chronicle walks a fine line between a conservative parody that allows us to laugh at the Catholic bigotry of Agapida and congratulate ourselves on our own enlightened understanding of history, and an indulgence of Agapida that allows us to understand that our historiography does indeed have to be reared on the fragments of a partial (in both senses) and specious historical practice. The introduction of Irving’s Chronicle implies a complex model of historical understanding and historical writing. On the one hand, the narrator’s approach suggests that history is textual documentation: the history of the Reconquista has literally been created by chronicles like Agapida’s, and so must be recreated and understood through (and not somehow beyond) them. On the other hand, understanding the ideological shaping of these documents and the political uses to which they have been put facilitates a sort of transcendent authenticity, a truth arrived at through the accurate representation of historical representation. Through the conceit of Agapida, in other words, Irving managed to produce three texts in one: the first major English-language history, essentially accurate in its account, of the fifteenth-century Granada war; a parody of pious chronicles produced under the banner of the Inquisition; and a self-reflexive meditation on historiography.

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Illusions of the Memory and the Imagination Crayon’s journey through the legendary realm of Muslim-Christian conflict in The Alhambra is thus also a journey through Irving’s own reflections on representing the past in the Chronicle. To the dialectic between history and romance developed in his Chronicle, Irving adds the dialectic between memory and imagination in The Alhambra. When Crayon reaches the end of his journey, he meets a guide named Mateo Ximenes, who introduces himself as a ‘son of the Alhambra’. (p. 755) Much taken with Ximenes’ selfrepresentation, Crayon declares that ‘the very tattered garb of my new acquaintance assumed a dignity in my eyes. It was emblematic of the fortunes of the place, and befitted the progeny of a ruin’. (p. 755) If the Alhambra itself memorializes the grandeur and decline of empire, then the current inhabitants of the Alhambra represent the native nobility and current sufferings of Andalucía. As his guide on the journey from Seville happily assumes the role of Sancho Panza, so this ‘hijo de la Alhambra’ happily assumes his identity with the palace. And as a cultural faith in Don Quixote supposedly shapes the actuality of Spain, so a cultural faith in the legends of Granada shapes both the native’s and the tourist’s experience of the Alhambra. This is especially true for Crayon, who is inclined to indulge in tales that bridge imagination and memory. He is thus particularly pleased to have engaged the services of Ximenes: ‘I had made an invaluable acquaintance in this son of the Alhambra, one who knew all the apocryphal history of the place, and firmly believed in it, and whose memory was stuffed with a kind of knowledge for which I have a lurking fancy, but which is too apt to be considered rubbish by less indulgent philosophers’. (p. 760) For Crayon, since the Alhambra should be a site of historical and poetical pilgrimage, its inhabitants become repositories of legendary history. Whereas the Irving of the Chronicle understands the past through layers of history, chronicle, and romance, the Irving of The Alhambra understands the past through local legends that become layers of the place itself. Soon after Crayon arrives at the Alhambra, he meets the Governor, who offers Crayon his own quarters for the remainder of his stay. While Crayon thus finds himself ‘sole monarch of this shadowy realm’, he is not left entirely alone to explore the Alhambra: Crayon is waited on by the family appointed to look after the monument, and Mateo Ximenes ‘install[s] himself [Crayon’s] valet, cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire’. (pp. 765-66) Ximenes is particularly well qualified to serve his many functions, since he ‘values himself on [...] his stock of local information, having the most marvellous stories to relate of every tower, and vault, and

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gateway of the fortress, in all of which he places the most implicit faith’. (p. 767) These stories come from Ximenes’ grandfather, who lived for almost a hundred years in the Alhambra. Ximenes is thus possessed of a lineage of quasi-historical information, ‘a stock of valuable knowledge concerning the Alhambra, not to be found in books, and well worthy the attention of every curious traveller’. (p. 767) All of Crayon’s narratives about the Alhambra, as he makes clear on many occasions, are thus grounded in local knowledge as represented by Ximenes, and Ximenes in turn is a sort of emanation of the physical space of the Alhambra. This historiographic partnership partially accounts for the enduring popularity and perceived authenticity of The Alhambra: Crayon’s collection is supposed to represent not simply the random gleanings of the idle tourist, but the deeply-rooted narratives of cultural memory. To Ximenes’ legendary oral knowledge, Crayon adds some textual legends of his own. He explains that Granada has long been a ‘subject of [his] waking dreams’, ever since his ‘earliest boyhood, when, on the banks of the Hudson, [he] first pored over the pages of old Gines Perez de Hytas’s apocryphal but chivalresque history of the civil wars of Granada’. (p. 769) Since he has frequently ‘trod in fancy the romantic halls of the Alhambra’, Crayon’s current residence there seems to him like a fantasy. (p. 769) And since Pérez de Hita (or Hytas) is one of the most important sources for Irving’s A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, Crayon inhabits a world made up of the physical space of the fortress, Ximenes’ local legends, mediaeval chivalric history, and Irving’s other Spanish texts. When Crayon produces his influential romanticization of the Alhambra, he is thus developing a complex dialectic between textual and oral accounts of the past and between cultural memory and physical space. In the opening of ‘The Court of Lions’, Crayon encapsulates this process: ‘[t]he peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace, is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and the imagination’. (p. 816) Crayon’s abstract formulation of the living past displaces the agency through which romantic and historical meaning is produced outside the writer’s mind; the Alhambra itself generates (with the assistance of the sufficiently receptive observer) its own meaning. The naked reality of the present crumbling Alhambra is covered by the illusions of its past glories and legendary association; the historical significance of the monument, through reveries and picturings of the past, makes it whole again in the mind of the romantic historian and the tourist who follows him. In this particular formulation, ‘memory’ and ‘imagination’ are similarly illusory, or perhaps similarly illuminating: though both distort the naked reality of the present, both can imbue place with meaning.

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Crayon’s musings on the Alhambra’s memorial power bear striking affinities with Paul Ricoeur’s theorization of cultural memory. As Irving imagines him producing illusions of memory and imagination, Crayon fluctuates between passive memory and active recollection, or what Ricoeur would call affective and constructive memory.26 For Ricoeur, memory can be considered as an experience (what happens to one when remembering) or as an activity (how one searches for and represents something that has happened in the past): it is both a pathos and a praxis. Ricoeur’s distinction between the cognitive state of memory and the pragmatic exercise of it — the contrast between active and passive, or subject and object of memory, or ‘evocation’ and ‘search’ — reveals the play of memory, its oscillation between the affective connection to the past and the analysis of it. For Ricoeur, this preliminary division helps him to explain the transferential potential of individual memory and the possibility of interpersonal memory. Ricoeur maintains that the principle of ‘appropriation’, as the ‘self-ascribable modality of attribution’, legitimates the positing of collective or cultural memories: ‘it is this capacity to designate oneself as the possessor of one’s own memories that leads to attributing to others the same mnemonic phenomena as oneself’. (p. 128) By analogy to individual consciousness, Ricoeur suggests that we are ‘authorized to use the first person in the plural form and ascribe to an us [...] all the prerogatives of memory: mineness, continuity, the past-future polarity’. (p. 119) Through this analogical hypothesis, ‘which makes intersubjectivity bear all the weight of the constitution of collective entities’, one can understand collective memory as ‘a collection of traces left by the events that have affected the course of history of the groups concerned’, a knowledge of the past expressed through (but non-identical with) history. (Ricoeur, p. 119) I would add that nothing prevents us from seeing in collective memory a point of resistance to dominant interpretations of history.

The Moor’s Last Sigh Redux Bridging the affective experience of the past and the active analysis of history, Irving’s Spanish texts are both analeptic and proleptic, looking backward to the ways in which previous generations have understood the past and looking forward to the ways in which future generations might under26

My synopsis is drawn from the chapter ‘Personal Memory, Collective Memory’ in Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 93-132.

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stand them. Through A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada’s immersion in old chronicles, and through The Alhambra’s immersion in local legend, Irving tries to record the collection of traces left by events in Andalucía on Moors and Spaniards alike. Irving’s experiments with intersubjective comprehension of the past, awkward as they might seem from our perspective on the other side of Modernism, endeavor to suggest that memory might be a shared phenomenon, especially when grounded in place. But contrary to the claims of many of his critics, Irving is not content to dwell in a nostalgic haze of stories and legends. While he emphasizes the ways in which politics and religion shape historical understanding in his Chronicle, he undertakes a project of historical revisionism in The Alhambra. Irving intends The Alhambra, at least in part, to redeem the memory of Boabdil, last Muslim ruler of Granada, who has been ‘foully and unjustly slandered’ in accounts of the past: ‘[i]f ever [Boabdil] cherished the desire of leaving an honorable name on the historic page, how cruelly has he been defrauded of his hopes’. (p. 820) In Crayon’s view, Boabdil has been reviled for the persecution of his wife, the murder of his sister and her two children, and the slaughter of the Abencerrages in the Court of Lions. But according to Crayon, none of these events can be found either in the ‘authentic chronicles’ of ‘Spanish authors [...] contemporary with Boabdil’, or in ‘all the Arabian authorities [he] could get access to, through the medium of translation’. (p. 820) Crayon traces all these slanderous accounts to ‘a work commonly called “The Civil Wars of Granada,” containing a pretended history of the feuds of the Zegries and Abencerrages, [...] [which] professed to be translated from the Arabic by one Gines Perez de Hita’. (p. 821) (Irving’s complex treatment of Spanish history and legend is intimated by recalling that this same Pérez de Hita was read by Crayon on the banks of the Hudson and used as a source for the Chronicle by Agapida.) Asserting that Pérez de Hita’s spurious work is ‘a mass of fiction, mingled with a few disfigured truths’, Crayon sets out to refute its representations of Boabdil. In a provocative selfreferential gesture, Crayon asserts that ‘great latitude is undoubtedly to be allowed to romantic fiction, but there are limits which it must not pass’. (p. 821) Among the most important of these limits is to respect ‘the names of the distinguished dead, which belong to history’. (p. 821) In what follows, Crayon essays a little unromantic history to clear Boabdil’s name. Countering Pérez de Hita’s claims is a relatively easy matter, but changing the perception of Boabdil in cultural memory presents a knottier problem. As Crayon asks, ‘[w]ho is there that has turned the least attention to the romantic history of the Moorish domination in Spain, without kindling at the alleged atrocities of Boabdil?’ (p. 820) Boabdil’s memory has not only

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been traduced by Spanish historians, but his alleged atrocities have ‘passed into ballads, dramas, and romances, until they have taken too thorough possession of the public mind to be eradicated’. (p. 820) From ‘foreigner[s] of education’ to ‘peasant[s] of the Vega or the Sierra’, all join to ‘execrate the very name of Boabdil’. (p. 820) Against this tide of calumny, Crayon mounts his own quixotic campaign. In his effort to alter the current of cultural memory, Crayon literally mounts a horse to ‘trace the mementos of him still existing in this scene of his sovereignty and misfortunes’. (p. 832) Crayon retraces the path Boabdil took on his exile from the fortress, the ‘via dolorosa [by which] poor Boabdil took his sad departure’. (p. 834) Riding from the Puerta de los Molinos (the Gate of the Mills) to la Cuesta de las Lágrimas (the Hill of Tears), finally stopping at el último suspiro del Moro (the last sigh of the Moor), Crayon spatializes a process of sympathetic identification with Boabdil. Having ridden a few miles in Boabdil’s shoes, Crayon can conclude that though Boabdil had some flaws, on the whole the historical ‘balance inclin[es] in his favor’. (p. 835) Through this brief journey, Crayon manages to inhabit the historical past and the world of Agapida’s Chronicle. His success in historical revision can be measured by his success in establishing this route as a tourist pilgrimage. The summit which is designated el último suspiro del Moro, in particular, is firmly established as a spot where travelers empathize with Boabdil and view the events of the Reconquista from his — and Crayon’s — perspective. Just as Irving managed to create an Andalusian tourist tradition by insisting that one already existed, by encouraging sentimental identification with Boabdil, Irving also managed to retrench and to reshape the cultural memory of Andalucía.

Bibliography ‘Alhambra Legends’, Alhambra.com [accessed 27 October 2008] Buzard, James, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) Dekker, George, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) ‘The Don Quixote Route: A Place for Adventure’, in Quixote: IV Centenario. [accessed 31 October 2008]

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Gifra-Adroher, Pere, Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000) Grabar, Oleg, The Alhambra (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) Hoffman, Louise, ‘Irving’s Use of Spanish Sources in the Conquest of Granada’, Hispania: A Journal Devoted to the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese, 28.4 (1945), 483-98. Irving, Washington, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, From the MSS. of Fray Antonio Agapida, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1829) ——, Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra (New York: Library of America, 1991) ‘Ruta de Washington Irving’, in Las Rutas de El Legado Andalusí, [accessed 27 October 2008] Nunges, Barbara, ‘Paradise Regained: Washington Irving’s Mythological Spain’, in America and the Mediterranean: AISNA, Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Biennial International Conference, Genova, November 8-11, 2001, ed. by Massimo Bacigalupo and Pierangelo Castagneto (Turin: Otto editore, 2003), pp. 333-42. ‘People: Washington Irving’, Andalucia.com, [accessed 27 October 2008] Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Saglia, Diego, ‘The Exotic Politics of the Domestic: The Alhambra as Symbolic Place in British Romantic Poetry’, Comparative Literature Studies 34.3 (1997), pp. 197-225. ——, ‘The Moor's Last Sigh: Spanish-Moorish Exoticism and the Gender of History in British Romantic Poetry’, Journal of English Studies (Logroño, Spain), 3 (2001-2002), pp. 193-215. ‘Tales of Andalusia’, An Andalusian Experience, [accessed 27 October 2008] Williams, Stanley T., The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935)

M. Soledad Caballero and Jennifer Hayward

‘An occasional trait of Scotch shrewdness’: Narrating Nationalism in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico In her 1843 travel narrative Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in That Country, Frances Calderón de la Barca manipulates the travel narrative genre in order to present a political and proto-ethnographic analysis of Mexican society and culture. Like many women travelers throughout the nineteenth century, Calderón aspires to the status of factual and reliable observer but is unable to claim that authority on the basis of gender. To increase the credibility of her observations, therefore, she asserts a privileged perspective based on her status as a European and contrasts English civilization with Mexican primitivism. As she comes to understand the country, Calderón records the gradual disruption and dismantling of her preconceptions — an uncomfortable process, since it is one that deconstructs the binaries that structure her life. To compound her increasingly difficult nationalist negotiations, Calderón struggles to claim the status of the civilized English traveler. As a Scottish national, a British émigré, and the wife of a Spanish diplomat (who was the first ambassador sent by that country to Mexico after Independence), her subject position as a ‘real’ English subject is troubled at best. In this essay, we demonstrate key differences in Calderón’s use of nationalist adjectives, including ‘English’, ‘British’, and ‘Scottish’, and we argue that she initially attempts to reinforce her status and subject position as a European — and specifically English and imperial — traveler in Mexico by configuring and collapsing her Scottish identity under the rubric of an English nationalist perspective. However, despite her best efforts, Calderón confronts the limits of imperial nationalist identity when her vision of a primitive, picturesque, and stable Mexico returns the gaze, making de la Barca’s own problematic European identity the object of surveillance.

Introduction In 1839, Frances Calderón de la Barca left the United States, which she dubbed ‘that wide-awake nation to the North’, to take up residence in Mexico. In 1843, she published an account of her experiences: Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in That Country. She initially describes Mexico as a ‘primitive’ country whose chaotic politics, sleepy pace of life, and undeveloped economy stood in sharp contrast to the wide-awake nation she had just left. Typically for her time, then, Calderón begins her journey comfortably within the imperial perspective: she judges, condemns and advises improvements to bring Mexico closer into line with European and North American standards of organization and efficiency.

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Even as she critically surveys the country, however, Calderón begins to realize that the objects of her ethnographic attention are far from passive; they exceed her attempts to categorize and contain them. Moreover, the people she meets are busy assessing her even as she scrutinizes them, and she soon becomes uncomfortably aware that she herself has become an object of surveillance. Ultimately, political events and national identities converge to push Calderón into the liminal space of melancholia. As a peripatetic Scotswoman educated in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition during the Romantic era, she is perhaps all too able to inhabit the melancholic subject position, which produces a unique perspective on the shifting national identity of this new Republic to the South. She finds herself permanently altered by her experience in Mexico; after moving to Spain with her husband, she converts to Catholicism and remains in her adopted country even after her husband dies. She never does return ‘home’ — whatever that may have come to mean in the course of her long travels. Calderón’s work has recently begun to receive wider critical attention due to her revision of gendered travel narrative conventions as well as her considerable influence on U.S. political intervention in Mexico.1 She traveled during a time of large-scale political and cultural shifts resulting from independence movements across Spanish America and Brazil as well as the reconfiguration of the British Empire in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Even before British involvement in Spanish American independence, its empire in the Americas meant that Scottish and Irish populations are inextricably linked to the histories of ‘the New World’. Murray Pittock notes that ‘around 70 per cent of British settlers were Scots or Irish between 1700 and 1780’ and reminds us, ‘Both the Scots and Irish had a long diasporic tradition as soldiers of fortune, Jacobites, servants of empire, economic and forced migrants, merchants and traders’.2 As a result of her allegiances with Scotland, England, Spain, and North America, Calderón’s own identity shifts throughout her narrative and her presence in Mexico is emblematic of the shifting terrain of transatlantic relations. 1

2

The best recent work on Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico includes Miguel Cabañas, ‘North of Eden: Romance and Conquest in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico’, Studies in Travel Writing, 9 (2005), 1-19; Amy Kaplan and Nina Gerassi-Nevarro, ‘Between Empires: Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 9.1 (2005), 3-27; and Nigel Leask, ‘“The Ghost in Chapultepec”: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts’, in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. by Jás Elsner and Joan Pau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 184-209. Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 246, 235.

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This changing imperial landscape, combined with the professionalization of the book industry, transformed travel writing from the endeavor of an anomalous few — often motivated by scientific curiosity and intended for specialists — to a popular genre for mass readers. Nigel Leask summarizes a parallel shift in travel writing from a more scientific and ‘objective’ focus in the eighteenth century to a more ‘literary’ and introspective focus after the 1820s.3 Not coincidentally, this transformation also parallels the rise of the novel: just as the travel text maps the geocultural location of the (British) individual in the colonial landscape, so the nineteenth century novel maps the economic and social location of the individual in the shifting landscapes of class. More broadly, increased travel and trade combined with industrialization to contribute to the growing emphasis on nationalisms worldwide. Benedict Anderson argues that the concept of individual ‘nations’ with unique identities developed between 1778-1838 as a result of print culture. For Anderson, the nation as an ‘imagined community’ emerges with the conjunction of print culture and Criollos’ imagining of their own identity separate from the imperial center of Spain. He challenges conventional thinking by arguing that European nationalism was spurred by the developing self-concept and revolutionary philosophy of new nations in the Americas, a perception that neatly reverses the gaze from colony to metropole even as it provides motivation for the quantitative surge in European travelers’ accounts of the Americas during this period.4 While Anderson’s account has been definitive in connecting narratives of nationhood with the creation of a space called the nation, his formations of nationalism tend to be relatively masculine and thus potentially limiting when considering a figure like Calderón. As woman travel writer, Calderón’s authority is conditioned by the strictures of gender ideology. As a British citizen, moreover, her national allegiances are vexed, prompting the question ‘Is this text British, Scottish, North American, Mexican, or Spanish, or, as [William] Prescott wrote to [Charles] Dickens, a text by a Spaniard writing in English?’5 Calderón is neither singularly English nor singularly un-English. Hers is a story about the limits of conceptualizing a singular ‘imagined community’. Instead, she positions herself in ways akin to what Pittock dubs 3

4

5

Of course, Leask complicates the easy dichotomy between enlightenment objectivity and romantic subjectivity; see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4-14. This increase also resulted at least in part from the lifting of restrictions on travel in South America. Kaplan and Gerassi-Navarro, p. 9.

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Fratriotism, that is, ‘a mindset which arises from conflicting loyalties generated by inclusion in a state with which one does not fully identify’.6 In Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha acknowledges the importance of Benedict Anderson’s foundational theory of European nations’ ‘ambivalent emergence’, while broadening that reading to emphasize poststructural insights into the ways that national identity is always in process, always a function of narration, and always necessarily hybrid. Bhabha asks, ‘If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of “nationness”: the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other’.7 As an ‘English’ woman travel writer, Calderón was expected to keep her distance from Mexicans below her own class, to emphasize domestic pleasures, and to leave the unheimlich terrors of life in Mexico — its frequent revolutions, extreme poverty, breathtaking but dangerous landscapes — to male writers. But she refused to limit herself to the safe, ‘English’, ‘feminine’ perspective, exploring instead the ambivalence she found at the heart of Mexican identity — and, in the process, at the heart of her own. As we will argue, while Calderón does initially attempt to inscribe Englishness as the strategic site of her privilege, the historical situation in which she finds herself resists easy dichotomies; her gender and marriage further elucidate the tenuousness of a privilege that must depend on the vectors of a stable national identity. In the end, Calderón does not so much highlight Pittock’s ‘fratriotism’ as explode notions of fixed gazes or stable subject positions. Her narrative inscribes not only her own conflicting loyalties, but as importantly indicates that spaces imagined as static, other, historically suspended, or fixed — as Mexico initially emerges in her travel narrative — do not remain so, even within a singular text. Her narrative brings to the forefront the fissures of her conflicting allegiances, and offers us the limits not only of an imperial subjectivity but also of a national fixed gaze. And as Calderón — liminal as a result of both nationality and gender — explores her own shifting subject position, the story she tells about Mexico is seized upon by the United States as part of its own national ambitions. In this process, Calderón’s text exposes the ways nation-building proceeds through the process of narration.

6 7

Pittock, p. 239. Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 2.

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Most travel writers in newly independent Mexico did not seem to feel the sense of in-between or liminal identity that Calderón inscribes.8 Why did Calderón experience the relationship between (Anglo-American) Self and (Mexican) Other differently than her travel-writing peers? Gender alone cannot explain her difference, since other women travelers emerged from Latin America with their sense of ‘home’ unchallenged. One explanation may be that Calderón’s own identity was unusually fluid. Born in Edinburgh in 1804 and raised in Scotland, Frances Erskine Inglis was exiled from her native land as a young adult. Like other nineteenth-century women travelers, Inglis’ life was shaped by the financial improvidence of male relatives.9 Her father’s bankruptcy forced the family to emigrate to Normandy in 1828; he died not long after the move, and in 1830 Calderón traveled to the United States with her mother, three sisters, and three nieces. They hoped to support themselves by teaching, and did succeed in opening small schools, first in Boston (whence they were driven by a scandal far too complicated to explain here) and then in Staten Island, where she met the Spanish minister to the United States, Angel Calderón de la Barca, in 1835. They were married in New York on 24 September 1838; spent the winter of 1838-1839 in Washington DC; and then left for Mexico, where Angel Calderón de la Barca had been appointed the first Spanish Ambassador.10 With this appointment, 8

9

10

Of other travel narratives written about Mexico in the 1840s, perhaps the best known is John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, & Yucatan (1841). Brantz Mayer, secretary to the U.S. embassy in Mexico from 1841 to 1842, published Mexico as It Was and as It Is in 1844, dedicating the book to Powhatan Ellis, minister to Mexico (183942). Mayer makes a fascinatingly contradictory argument, condemning Spanish imperialism, which ‘plundered’ the land and destroyed an idealized Indian culture even as it urged U.S. emigration to Mexico to provide ‘the stimulus of example, and the infusion of a new and energetic blood into the system’ (353). Another influential text is Waddy Thompson’s Recollections of Mexico (1846), which refers to Calderón’s Life; Thompson was sent as extraordinary envoy to Mexico in 1842 to negotiate the release of U.S. prisoners from the 1841 Santa Fe expedition, an improbable attempt on the part of the Republic of Texas to gain control of the Santa Fe Trail. Interestingly, one text that does show evidence of ‘going native’ is by another newly-married woman: Susan Shelby Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, 1846-1847. One of these, Calderón’s contemporary Frances Trollope, was also forced to support her family due to her husband’s financial difficulties; she arrived in North America just a year before Calderón herself and published her scathing Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832. For a thorough discussion of Mexican independence and history, see Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power: a history of Modern Mexico, 1810-1996, trans. by Hank Heifetz (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997). For a discussion of Calderón’s diplomatic preparations see Linda Ledford Miller, ‘A Protestant Critique of Catholicism: Frances Calderón de la Barca in Nineteenth Century Mexico’, in Gender, Genre, & Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. by Kristi Siegel (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 225-233.

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Spain officially recognized Mexico, formerly the colony of New Spain, as an independent country.11 The Calderóns were to live in Mexico for two years, experiencing its culture, people, and political turmoil.

First Impressions: Eyes on the Valley Like many women travelers throughout the nineteenth century, in her journal Calderón initially aspires to the status of factual and reliable observer. Early travel writers intended their texts to provide objective information about the world. Narratives served as sources of geographical, botanical, economic, political, and cultural information for armchair travelers eager for information about the world beyond their borders. They also served as guidebooks for people interested in journeying to the region themselves, whether for pleasure, business, or colonization. Women travel writers in the nineteenth century were generally expected to focus on a subset of typical travel-writing concerns: emphasizing the domestic lives and sentimental aspects of the countries they visited — describing the appearance, habits, diet and so on of the new land — rather than assessing the economic situation, evaluating possibilities for trade, or critiquing politics the way male travel writers generally did. Unable to claim authority on the basis of gender, then, especially when describing topics deemed public and therefore male, Calderón subtly reshapes the conventions of the female travel narrative in order to expand its range of possibilities. To do so without alienating readers, however, she needed to first win over her audience by excusing her violations of convention and establishing her credentials as a reliable interpreter. In order to accomplish these goals, she invokes a European authority based upon a dichotomy between ‘English’ cultural civilization and Mexican primitivism. Calderón attempts to craft an oppositional identity in relation to Creole, mestizo, and indigenous populations around her. Initially Calderón uses discourses Miguel Cabañas describes as ‘the Orientalist tradition [...] mixed with the Biblical myth of Eden’ to position herself as a modern, European subject in relation to the existing Mexican social geographic landscape.12 Having traveled from the Northeastern United States by way of Cuba where 11

Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1821, but King Ferdinand VII refused to acknowledge his former colony’s autonomy. It was only after his death and the accession of his daughter the infant Isabella II in 1833 that negotiations began between the two nations. In 1836 the Spanish courts declared Mexico a friendly nation and, as a result, appointed their first official ambassador to the country. 12 Cabañas, p. 80.

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‘everything struck us as strange and picturesque’ and where there is ‘nothing European’, Calderón maps her journey from Anglo industry and ‘progress’ towards a degenerating cornerstone of the Spanish empire: a newly independent Mexico.13 As we have noted, Calderón does not arrive in Mexico directly from Europe. Rather, she had spent the last decade in the United States where she had observed the industry of an emerging new world power in the geographic nexus between progress and merchant entrepreneurship. Part of her comparison of nations not only distinguishes that which is European — and specifically English — from that which is Mexican, but also asserts a Northern and Southern American divide. At the beginning of her journey, Calderón perceives the Mexican landscape as melancholy as she maps a terrain apparently uninhabited by culture or modernity. As she travels from the coast of Veracruz to central Mexico, she claims: I do not think there is anything in this world that could induce me to live here. The more I see, the more I become convinced of this fact, that the further we recede from civilization, the less happy we are. To live amongst people, however kind, with whom you have not one thought in common must be melancholy. To a person brought up in England and accustomed to European society, a place where the trace of a book is not to be seen — where women spend their time in perfect idleness, smoking, idleness without grace, and where you can find no subject upon which to converse causes an aridness of feeling which is as triste as it would be to settle among the red sandhills in the neighborhood.14

Given the fact that the ‘red sandhills of Veracruz are themselves a melancholy sight’, with neither ‘tree, or shrub, or flower, or bird’, for Calderón the prospect of living in Mexico appears culturally devoid of joy. She repeats ‘melancholy’ thirty-six times in total, and almost a third of these instances cluster in just the first thirteen of the fifty-four letters of the book: Veracruz appears more ‘melancholy, délabré and forlorn’ than can ‘well be imagined’, the houses have ‘that unfurnished melancholy look’.15 (pp. 38-39) Even General Santa Anna himself appears, to the culture-shocked Calderón, as a ‘rather melancholy-looking person’. (p. 45)

13

14 15

Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in that Country, ed. by Woodrow Borah (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1946), pp. 20-21. Unless otherwise noted, quotations in the text are from this edition. This quote is taken from the from the Fisher edition, p. 62. Interestingly, as we will discuss at the end of this essay, the final 20 references are clustered in the last section of the book, as Calderón mourns the necessity of leaving Mexico.

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By arguing for her temporal distance from the wildness and primitivism before her, Calderón invokes a well-known Romantic trope and travel narrative convention: the ennuyée, or melancholic traveler, as a civilized ‘European’ subject. Though by 1838 this trope is relatively gendered, it is women who by this time are often melancholy in the fact of foreign terrains. The language of civilization manifests itself in her use of proto-ethnographic language and its new ideas of human development, and suggests a fundamental divide between the land and people of Mexico and her own European experience.16 In carving out her civilized distance from Mexico, Calderón establishes what David Spurr identifies as a typical travel-writing trope: a static ‘cultural and moral difference between the civilized and the noncivilized’.17 As a European who does not ‘have one thought in common’ with those around her, Calderón structures her social and geographic interactions as failures of engagement. Indeed, the melancholy produced by the confrontation between AngloEuropean industrial energy and the Romantic pre-Hispanic past shapes the whole of the narrative. No matter how ‘kind’ the locals, in her view, receding from civilization and entering the world of Mexico produces melancholy early in the text. However, invoking the trope of Romantic melancholy does not render for Calderón a Wordsworthian and thus potentially more masculine landscape of ‘abundant recompense’. Nor does it provide her with an individual connection, that ‘sense sublime’ that recovers the individual 16

17

Discourses of human evolution were, of course, fueled by global exploration and reportage; often the sources of data were travel narratives. The drive to classify and categorize living organisms began in the mid-to-late eighteenth century as a natural science perspective began to dominate descriptive models of exploration literature; this drive to classification developed alongside British mobility around the globe. Mary Louise Pratt explains this scientific shift by noting that the emphasis of exploration changed from coastline and maritime mapping to ‘interior exploration’. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 30. David Spurr’s argument in The Rhetoric of Empire is somewhat dated in its assessment of the colonized and colonizer. However, his discussions of the ways in which imperial rhetoric is still with us, in particular the First versus Third World dichotomies such rhetoric creates, and the ways imperial cultures paradoxically both distance themselves and seek identification from their colonies remain useful. As Spurr argues, ‘the ultimate goal of colonial discourse is not to establish a radical opposition between colonizer and colonized. It seeks to dominate by inclusion and domestication rather than by a confrontation that recognizes the independent identity of the Other. Hence the impulse, whether in administrative correspondence or journalistic writing, to see colonized peoples as ultimately sympathetic to the colonizing mission and to see that mission itself as bringing together the peoples of the world in the name of common humanity’. See The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 32.

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mind in the face of sorrow before the landscape. For Calderón, melancholic feelings induced by the landscape before her signal her natural and social alienation from it, and more importantly, these feelings become the critical marker of civilization: her European national identity. So, for example, when first entering Mexico City at the beginning of the narrative, Calderón notes, ‘as we strained our eyes to look into the valley, it all appeared to me rather like a vision of the Past than the actual breathing Present. The curtain of Time seemed to roll back, and to discover to us the great panorama that burst upon the eye of Cortez when he first looked down upon the table-land’. (p. 60) Here, then, the past is lovely and soft; there are visions of another moment, safely ensconced; the past does not threaten the fantasy of what she thinks she sees. Unlike Keats, Calderón de la Barca does not use Cortez as a figure for present or future discoveries; there is no urgency of Chapman’s translation here, no passion of what is yet to be imagined, there are no ‘eagle eyes’ as she stands, her eyes ‘straining’ to the see a present. Rather we have a languid, safely distant space, unthreateningly stable and Romantic. This work of stabilizing Mexico is, of course, part of the aesthetic and ideological impetus of making hers an authoritative voice. The trope of melancholy either positions Mexico in a dream-like fantasy space, a synchronic sense of ‘being transported three centuries back, and half afraid that the whole would flit away, and prove a mere vision, a waking dream’, or it produces a Mexico that even in its contemporaneous existence offers the imaginary of a degenerative state, presented as an historically visible space of ruins. (p. 154) If not in the nostalgic picturesque, then, we are in a ruined Mexico. When describing contemporary institutions like the Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City, Calderón laments: ‘But the present disorder, the abandoned state of the building, the nonexistence of these excellent classes of sculpture and painting, and above all, the low state of the fine arts in the present day, are amongst the sad proofs, if any were wanting, of the melancholy effects produced by years of civil war and unsettled government’. (p. 137) Here then if we don’t have the ‘dream’ of three centuries ago, we have the material evidence of a former empire in ruins. The historical realities of the present moment either cut against the ‘dream’ or reify the stability of Mexico as formerly powerful but no longer so. In either case, we live elsewhere than a modern present. At this early point in the narrative, these two vectors of melancholy do not destabilize Calderón’s own subject position. However, they do signal the implicit alienating effects that ultimately open space for instability in her subject position, and they demonstrate the ways in which Mexico exceeds the stability of its contradictory dreamlike or ruined state.

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If we return to the melancholy evoked in Vera Cruz as Calderón enters the country, then, we see the formulations of an alienating melancholy ultimately emerge from being ‘accustomed to European society’. (p. 62) For Calderón, this melancholy calls attention to two contradictory but related effects. On the one hand, melancholic feelings distinguish her, a European, and maintain European standards amidst Mexican ‘idleness’, signifying the inherent divide between European travelers and ‘natives’. (p. 62) On the other hand, melancholic feelings also define what we argue is a failure — at least initially — of contact with local ‘primitives’. In Calderón’s delineation melancholy is the marker of the civilized European abroad, not the potent melancholy of a masculine Romantic robustness such as Wordsworth or Keats might invoke. Instead, this sensation necessarily impedes genuine contact with locals, negating the possibility of connection precisely because melancholy consolidates her European identity. For the European abroad, then, maintaining European standards produces a potentially undesired effect — solitude. The melancholic traveler becomes another name for the alienated, civilized traveler. And in Calderón’s case, this melancholy is a marker of aesthetics and taste, potentially but not entirely within the realm of the feminine. It is after all, women who smoke in Mexico, a habit Calderón finds in bad taste; at the same time, women do not read, at least not within her limited observation. Thus again, melancholy demarks her European authority and hints at it vis a vis her gender. Also important to remember is that European solitude — that is, failure of contact with locals — emerges as a direct result of Mexican primitivism. In this formulation, Mexican deficiency is not only reflected in their ‘idleness without grace’ but also is reflected in the European traveler as well. (p. 62) In Calderón’s discussion, melancholy is simultaneously an original European product, and also paradoxically a by-product of Mexico’s savagery. By representing melancholy as un-English and un-European, but also as the identifying marker of English-European response to primitivism, Calderón holds fast to a European hegemonic belief system in the face of the foreign. By this paradoxical trope, Mexican deficiency is responsible for its idleness and for the European’s trauma, while European norms and standards remain uncontested. Melancholia not only becomes the marker of European difference from Mexican primitivism, it also becomes the authorizing affective trope of Calderón’s journal.

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Looking at Mexico: Nostalgic Picturesque or Impenetrable Alienation Melancholy as a trope works in various ways in Calderón’s discursive efforts to pin down a stable, othered Mexico, however. And while it recurs as part of the overall dynamic of her journal, its shifts of emphasis map the increasing instability in her subject position. In fact, as Calderón narrates her experiences over two years in Mexico, she develops both a range of discursive uses of melancholy and a gradual shifting of emphases and tone. Initially, Mexican primitivism evokes a sense of what we can call a nostalgic picturesque, or it evokes her own sense of alienation and incomprehension at what she observes of this primitivism. As the travel narrative proceeds, melancholic moments may take a form that is elegiac, as when Calderón describes Veracruz, or they may take a more lingering and pleasurable form. A paradigmatic moment of what we are calling the nostalgic picturesque suggests itself when she describes the indigenous population on her way from Veracruz to Mexico City: ‘One circumstance must be observed by all who travel in Mexican territory. There is not one human being or passing object to be seen that is not itself a picture’. (p. 48) However, further on she adds, ‘The whole scene was wild and grand, yet dreary and monotonous’ and the ‘Indians’ are ‘a few miserable half-naked women and children’. (p. 56) This range of melancholic possibilities signal the transformation of national and cultural allegiances and conceptualizations Calderón confronts. That is, the incursion of melancholy into the text comes to signal her inability to stabilize either Mexico or her subject position within it. These two possibilities of melancholy, which structure her subject position in relation to Mexico, also tend to appear when discussing market possibilities that she argues are underutilized in Mexico, and they work to highlight North American industry against a backdrop of Mexican passivity. When traveling through the Desierto and observing the ruins of a convent against an astounding geography, for example, she writes, ‘this fertile region (which the knowing eye of a Yankee would instantly discover to be full of capabilities in the way of machinery), belongs to no one, and lies here deserted, in solitary beauty. Some poor Indians live among the ruins of the old cloisters’. (p. 300) Here, Calderón draws on a central convention of writings about the New World as a space of unlimited possibility coupled with almost sinful underdevelopment. In the same vein (and even in the same year), Brantz Mayer describes the valley surrounding Mexico City as a vast, undeveloped space where ‘one thing was wanting. Over the immense expanse there seemed scarce an evidence of life. There were no figures in the

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picture. It lay torpid in the sunlight, like some deserted region where Nature was again beginning to assert her empire — vast, solitary and melancholy’. (p. 35) Continuing her contrast between commerce and underdevelopment — presence and absence — in comparing Mexican and New England villages, Calderón writes, ‘If any one wishes to try the effect of strong contrast let him come direct from the United States to this country’. (p. 365) She then delineates the ‘flourishing village’ of the U.S. where ‘wooden churches or meeting-houses are all new’, where there are ‘smart stores and neat dwellinghouses; all new, all wooden, all clean’ and ‘everything proclaims prosperity, equality, consistency; the past forgotten, the present all in all, and the future taking care of itself’. (p. 365) What we see then in Calderón de Barca’s comparison is not only the superior industry of that ‘Yankee’ land to the north, but also the diachronic division between the ‘past’ which still haunts even contemporary Mexico and the ‘newness’, the eternal present, of the United States. Yet even in the midst of this contrast between energetic modernity and a languid past, Calderón’s tonal and descriptive qualities here do not champion in uncomplicated ways the temporal divide. For Brantz Mayer, that brash Yankee, the Mexican landscape is ‘solitary and melancholy’. For Frances Calderón, that displaced Scot, the same landscape lies ‘deserted, in solitary beauty’. For her, melancholy is elsewhere: in the in-between, the liminal space of possible futures encroaching on the timeless space that Mexico represents for her. In their astute discussion of the convergence of American and European alliances embodied in Calderón’s journal and their contradictory effects within the narrative, Kaplan and Gerassi-Navarro note that though her narrative engages ‘the buoyant triumph of Manifest Destiny’, it is ‘a profound sense of desolation and loss [that] pervades the text’.18 They argue that Calderón positions herself in the interstitial space between nationalist identities; thus she both observes Mexicans from a U.S. perspective and observes the prospect of U.S. informal or economic empire with dismay. At several points in the text, the European Calderón imagines North American conquest of a sleepy, disorganized Mexico. These are points when Calderón infuses her language with melancholy and ambivalence; as Kaplan and Gerassi-Navarro explain, confronted with a Romantic pre-Hispanic past, Calderón ‘welcomes the cleansing power of the United States, [but] she is struck by the combination of its voracious power and insubstantiality’.19 18 19

Kaplan and Gerassi-Navarro, p. 22. Kapland and Gerassi-Navarro, p. 23.

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‘As we say in Scotland’: Writing the Nation Calderón initially inscribes a sense of melancholy into her subject position, making it an authorizing trope to demonstrate her (European) authority and authenticity, whether infused with nostalgia or with alienation. This authorizing trope, however, cannot hold. Instead, Calderon’s sense of melancholy wavers drastically in her text because her own subject position is unstable. As a Scottish national, a British émigré, and the wife of a Spanish diplomat, Calderón struggles to claim the status of the civilized English traveler. Her claim to speak from the position of a ‘real’ English subject is, then, troubled at best. Travel literature of the early to mid-nineteenth century reflected — and helped to shape — the nationalist negotiations of a ‘United Kingdom’ whose unification wavered across the imperial age. Calderón provides a window into these negotiations. She inflects nationalist adjectives — including ‘English’, ‘British’, ‘Scottish’, and ‘Yankee’ — in specific ways; her usage in turn illuminates larger nationalist narratives as they were written during this period in British Imperial history and particularly in the history of Scottish relations with the British Empire. As Calderón attempts to convey the ‘real’ Mexico to her readers, she uses nationality in a way typical of travelers of this era: as a shorthand for communicating moral and cultural values and creating hierarchies necessary to her authority in the text. When describing specific objects or institutions that symbolize modernity, ‘civilization’, or the metropole, for instance, she tends to choose the term ‘English’, which she uses an impressive ninety-six times. Thus she praises the ‘solid-built English carriages [that] will stand the wear and tear of a Mexican life’; an English schooner; English breakfasts; English clubs; English energy; an English ball, country-house, and garden; and so on. She also generally uses the term ‘English’ for morally-inflected ethnographic demarcations; thus she describes ‘English children, clean and pretty, with their white hair and rosy cheeks, and neat straw bonnets, mingling with the little copper-coloured Indians’. (p. 182) More broadly, ‘English’ stands for specific moral qualities like order and cleanliness, as when she observes, ‘How consistent everything looks in a good English house! — so handsome without being gaudy — the plate so well cleaned, the servants so well trained’. (p. 383) Frequently, too, she follows the tendency of many Scottish, Irish, or Welsh women abroad and collapses the distinction

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between English and Scottish in her own identity, referring to herself simply as an ‘Englishwoman’.20 (p. 152) Also typical is the way Calderón broadens these specific ethnographic descriptions to make hierarchical distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cultures, resulting in cultural and morally inflected claims. Thus she contrasts the English energy that produces order and cleanliness ‘even’ in Mexico with the lack of energy and industry resulting from a too-mild climate, as when she asks rhetorically, ‘But what is the effect of this charming climate on the character and condition of the inhabitants? Bad enough to prove the sad truth, that man in his fallen state is not fitted for paradise [...] Great moral energy would be necessary to counteract the physical influence of the climate, and neither education nor necessity teach or impart it’.21 Mexico becomes a postlapsarian Eden, and only the ‘moral energy’ of the English (or, in a pinch, the North Americans) has a hope of redeeming its fallen state. Interestingly, Calderón uses the more accurate term ‘British’ in place of her preferred ‘English’ only once: to describe some miners, most of whom were in fact Scotsmen. In this she is typical of nineteenth century British travelers abroad, who tended to subordinate their regional allegiances into a larger — and implicitly imperial — ‘English’ national identity, reserving more accurate markers for personal memories or for moments when local affiliations defeat imperial identification. Ethnic or cultural identity, then, becomes connected with a Romantic nostalgia for ‘local color’, while a broader national identity becomes affiliated with imperial goals and selfpositioning.22 More commonly than ‘British’, Calderón uses the adjective ‘Scottish’, when she refers to people, or adds phrases like ‘as we say in Scotland’ or 20

21 22

For more on the national, political, and literary history between England and Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see Scotland and the Border of Romanticism, ed. by Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750-1850, ed. by Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Quote taken from Fisher edition, pp. 449-50. Calderón’s national adjectives parallel those of another Scotswoman publishing travel narratives about Latin American two decades before her: Maria Graham. Graham uses ‘English’ to describe objects or attitudes she considers ‘civilized,’ often contrasting those with the primitivity she (initially) perceives in South America. By contrast, she prefers the term ‘Scottish’ to recall nostalgic scenes or foods of childhood or to describe family affiliations, while the adjective ‘British’ appears specifically in relationship to the military or to empire. See Maria Graham, Journal of a voyage to Brazil, and residence there, during part of the years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: Longman et al. and John Murray, 1824); and Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile during the year 1822. And a voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman et al. and John Murray, 1824).

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‘with my thoughts in Scotland’ a total of twelve times — and crucially, these are the terms she chooses when speaking of her own ethnographic identity or when waxing nostalgic about ‘home’. She first arrives in Mexico City at night, in the pouring rain, on Christmas day; as she goes to bed in a strange house, she ‘thought of Christmas in “Merrie England,” and of our family gatherings in the olden time, and as if one had not travelled enough in the body, began travelling in the mind, away to far different, and distant, and long goneby scenes, fell asleep at length with my thoughts in Scotland, and wakened in Mexico!’ (p. 62) Here she conflates Scottish and English identities, geographic and temporal locations, in a way indicative of the fluidity of national identities as well as her use of proto-evolutionary theories.23 In essence, even when thinking of ‘home’, which in this case is both ‘Merrie England’ and Scotland, Calderón invokes what Johannes Fabian argues is a central relationship between the gazing imperial subject and her object of study, in this case a temporal dissonance between the modernity of England/Scotland and the ‘waking dream’ of Mexico.24 What this translates into is that when discussing family life and personal morality, or when reminded of those intangibles that constitute a sense of ‘home’, Calderón’s personal national affiliation seems to be Scottish. Her implied identification with the periphery conflicts with her explicit construction of England as the imperial centre. Calderón’s naming practices here contrast with the larger national affiliations developing across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Linda Colley argues in Britons that a new sense of what it meant to be British — rather than English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh — was forged in response to nationalist and imperialist movements worldwide and increased union at home. The Act of Union joining Scotland and England and transferring parliamentary power to London (1707), and the later Act of Union with 23

24

Calderón de la Barca is a product of a Scottish enlightenment education. As such, she was infused by the great drive of the eighteenth century to classify and categorize ‘new’ or ‘discovered’ human populations across the globe. Yet though this classificatory impulse needed space for hierarchies, a version of tiered monogenism, that is, the belief in an ‘originary pair,’ is her practice. Within monogenesist theory, the ‘degeneration’ theory of human evolution that maintained its dominance well into the nineteenth century structured itself around the concept of ‘degeneration’ or the idea that ‘all five races were offspring of a single primeval Caucasian type, which had “degenerated”’. See George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), p. 26. Degeneration allowed for a racial ‘hierarchy’ necessarily to imperial endeavors and an evolutionary ‘unity’ that contextualized the scientific explanations of human origins. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 26.

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Ireland (1800), produced a new sense of Britishness which began to trump local affiliations though it could not efface them entirely. This amalgamated identity would be tempered across the nineteenth century in colonial contact zones. But reading the development of national narratives as created unilaterally by centres contrasting themselves with peripheral Others oversimplifies the complex factors at work in the development of globally negotiated narratives of national identity. As Homi Bhabha puts it, ‘the ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself [...] The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity [...] the ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously “between ourselves”’. (p. 4) Calderón demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries among her own multiple national allegiances as she seeks to communicate her nationalist affiliations to (presumed Anglo-American) readers, speaking ‘between ourselves’ to categorize Mexican landscapes, culture and people as distinctly Other. By distinguishing among Scottish, British and English in personal and cultural matters, but reserving the imperial ‘English’ to contrast the Mexican moral or political climate with an imaginary imperial one, and by broadening her distinctions even more to contrast a generalized ‘Europe’ with the New World, Calderón actively creates ethnographic distinctions. She uses the more open-ended descriptor ‘European’ or ‘Europe’ fortythree times to demarcate her relationship to civilization as well as the distinction between European ‘civilization’ and the ‘primitive’ space of Mexico. For Calderón, the adjective ‘European’ or the location ‘Europe’ seems to function along two vectors. On the one hand, it is the word she most often uses as a sign of division between Mexican primitivism and European civilization. So, for example, when describing a cockfight in San Agustín and noting the presence of women at the event, she exclaims, ‘it has a curious effect to European eyes to see young ladies of good family, looking peculiarly feminine and gentle, sanctioning, by their presence, this savage diversion’. (p. 217) While all the markers of correct culture appear to be in place here in terms of gender, dress, and social class, something is lacking in the moral fiber of ‘good’ Mexican families that permit ‘savagery’ to exist alongside the gentile markers of what is ‘feminine and gentle’. And so ‘European’ here maps out the distinctions between what qualifies as civilized, that is to view such occasions as cock fighting as ‘savage’, and what only appears to be civilized, despite the external accoutrements. Similarly, she specifies ‘more of a European look’ or ‘a more European air’. (pp. 59, 123)

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Her use of ‘European’ also signals the necessity of inscribing fluidity into her subject position not only in terms of gender, but more importantly in terms of her nationality. Hers is a complicated situation. As we have seen, she initially positions herself squarely in the European hegemonic imperial subject position and situates Mexico in a space temporally and ethnographically removed from modernity. As the narrative progresses, however, she begins to assert her authority as a travel-writing subject not by the conventional method of proving her European credentials, but in a new way: by insisting on her ability to cross cultural boundaries.

‘Intimately Acquainted’: the Borderlands of Identity Since she arrives with an ‘official’ position as wife of the Spanish ambassador, Calderón automatically gains increased connections to Mexico and Mexicans. If nothing else, she has more access to those in power in Mexico in a variety of institutions. As she herself notes in a letter to American writer and historian William Hickling Prescott, a close friend of both Ángel and Frances Calderón’s, ‘Calderón not being considered a foreigner, I am intimate everywhere, and indeed with the exception of the diplomats, keep almost entirely to Mexican society, which is the best way of knowing the true state of things’.25 As Marie Woods notes, even before Calderón traveled to Mexico, she began practicing for the diplomatic and cultural expectations she would be expected to fulfill as the Spanish ambassador’s wife: ‘Upon marrying Calderón, Fanny was educated in Catholic doctrines […] She knew the terminology, memorized the prayers and attended Catholic mass in the United States. In preparation for her journey to Mexico, she read the history of the Church in Latin America and saw pictures of the splendid cathedrals. After all, she knew that she would be expected to ‘act Catholic’ for diplomatic reasons’.26 Her national fluidity in this context allows her to assert unusual authority as an ‘insider’, rendering her observations and information more valid; indeed, so credible was her information that when the Mexican-American war began, three years after its publication, Life in Mexico was placed in the library of every U.S. naval ship (to her horror, the book was often seen as a call for U.S. 25

26

‘Letter to William Hickling Prescott, 5 June 1840’ in Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderon de La Barca, ed. by Howard T Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966). Quoted in Linda Ledford-Miller, ‘A Protestant Critique of Catholicism: Frances Calderón de la Barca in Nineteenth Century Mexico’ in Gender, Genre, & Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. by Kristi Siegel (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), p. 226.

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intervention in the region). With William Prescott, Calderón was called as an ‘expert’ witness as the U.S. sought information about the region prior to invading.27 Prescott himself actively gleaned from her journal for his highly praised A History of the Conquest of Mexico; he relied absolutely on her descriptions of the natural world, since he never traveled to Mexico and became blind in the course of his work on this monumental book. While assuring her access and authority, however, her marriage also destabilizes her earlier attempts not only to position Mexico and Mexicans in a nostalgic and static past but also to align herself with the modernity of Europe. In other words, if her insider status lends narrative authority because of her knowledge of the intimate workings of Mexican society, it also undermines her discursive efforts to craft a national, and thereby cultural, superiority of what she often calls ‘Europe’ over Mexico. After all, if Calderón does not register as ‘foreign’ in Mexico, and she is ‘intimate’ with Mexican society, there is the very real potential that she will register as too foreign for her European — and specifically her English — audiences: that she will read as ‘native’ rather than as ‘European’. Because she is peculiarly positioned for such ‘intimate’ contact with Mexican society, then, her status as unquestionably English is disrupted. If she cannot insulate herself from Mexican society nor transplant English culture abroad to the exclusion what is Mexican, she may find herself excluded from the English nationality that grounds her authority throughout the journal. As we have noted, to a certain extent Calderón’s Scottish and American emigrant subject position already necessitates a certain amount of creative crafting of an explicitly English identity. But her marriage to a foreigner further complicates her claims to untainted English authenticity. Though she characterizes her marriage as a unique and beneficial distinction from the English community in Mexico, Calderón is nonetheless forced to maintain a balance between being unique but English abroad and being unable to claim an English identity because of her ‘unique’ difference. Given this knotting, which Kaplan and Gerassi-Navarro describe as the movement of ‘a migrating subject between these multiple and conflicting frames’, Calderón consistently attempts to reconfigure her own identity not as either English or Insider, but as both/and: at once familiar and strange, heimlich and unheimlich.28 She does this in a variety of ways, but most consistently she reframes her ‘intimacy’ as a sign of the credibility that cements her ability to speak to and about Mexican society. In light of her 27 28

Cabañas, pp. 4-5. Kaplan and Gerassi-Navarro, p. 5.

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compromised national identity, Calderón actively articulates her differences from other English residents in Mexico and she emphasizes her ‘insider’ status in relation to other English nationals who, as a definition of their nationality, do not interact with Mexican society. In one such cross-dressing example from about halfway through the narrative, Calderón implicitly notes her distinction from the generality of English in Mexico: We went lately to a ball given by a young Englishman, which was very pretty, and where nearly all the English were collected. Of families there are not more than half a dozen resident here, the members of whom form a striking contrast in complexion to the Mexicans. With very few exceptions (and these in the case of English women married to foreigners) they keep themselves entirely aloof from the Mexicans, live quietly in their own houses, into which they have transplanted as much English comfort as possible, rarely travel, and naturally find Mexico the dullest of cities. (p. 224, emphasis ours)

Though Calderón considers herself an English resident in Mexico, from the beginning she is also ‘an English woman married to a foreigner’. Her marriage necessarily distinguishes her from the English ‘who transplant as much English comfort as possible’ because unlike ‘them’, she cannot isolate herself from non-English society. Instead she attempts to spin this liminal position in English society to her advantage. Unlike other English residents who ‘keep themselves entirely aloof from the Mexicans’, as the Spanish ambassador’s wife Calderón is in a situation that requires travel and engagement with the culture; she cannot necessarily or ‘naturally’ be inclined to consider Mexico ‘the dullest of cities’. By distinguishing herself from ‘dull’ English residents who ‘rarely travel’ or explore their surroundings, Calderón claims an authority and an accuracy of experience that others lack, and by doing so, attempts to argue that her marriage to a foreigner affords her a position of privilege when describing Mexican social and cultural life. She often highlights her relationship with Mexico’s elite and her interactions with political leaders. Calderón’s marriage allows her access to parts of Mexican life that would otherwise be unavailable to her, and she chooses to construct this as a strength in her engagement with the locals. It is in fact a selling point when she seeks publication of her manuscript. Prescott noted this fact in his letter to Charles Dickens when he asked the author to help him publish Calderón’s journal in England: ‘The English and Americans who visit these countries [Mexico and Cuba] are so little assimilated to the Spaniards that they have had few opportunities of getting into the interior of their social life. Madame Calderón has improved her opportunities well, and her letters are those of a Spaniard

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writing in English’. (p. 316) For Prescott, it is Calderón’s marriage that allows her to excavate the interior lives of Mexicans. And Prescott considers de la Barca’s capacity to transform into a Spaniard a key selling point regarding the accuracy and credibility of her observations. As we will see shortly, not all observers approved of an Englishwoman writing as a Spaniard. Reviewers provided a diametrically opposed vision of Calderón’s status in Mexico, and they reflect a fundamental conflict that her narrative must negotiate, which is also what an ethnographic text must mediate: Calderón must examine Mexican culture closely by using the opportunities afforded her by her marriage to a ‘foreigner’ in order to be a credible observer, yet she must not examine to such a degree that her English identity is contested. To examine Mexican culture as a Spaniard’s wife and not as an Englishwoman makes both her nationality and her gender suspect and suggests that she has crossed over or ‘gone native’. With protoethnographic language in hand, she must attempt to narrate her interaction with Mexico while maintaining her civilized difference from it. She must inhabit the position of a ‘strategic participant’ and examine the foreign from and within visibly recognizable English and feminine attitudes. It is from this precariously constructed space that Calderón attempts to establish her authority as a uniquely empowered insider who nonetheless possesses the proper English character necessary to offer a trustworthy analysis of foreign life. But throughout the travel narrative, it is precisely this pervasive instability of subjectivity that brings to the forefront the knotted texture of Calderón’s national, political, and gender configurations, and more significantly the tenuous realities of performing clear lines of identity and identification in a Mexican terrain.

‘All Together a Varied and Curious Spectacle:’ The Gaze Returned Miguel Cabañas argues that as Calderón works to assert narrative authority, she shuns ‘masculine’ scientific discourse, instead adopting the more typically female position of the exploratrice sociale, while predicting an Angloimperialist and Protestant transformation of Mexico. By contrast, Nigel Leask emphasizes Calderón’s ambivalence as a Scotswoman ‘unable or unwilling to identify with the criollo nationalist myth of the Aztec past, but still less with the symbolic appropriation of the Mexican land and history by her Anglo-American male interlocutors Robert Southey and William

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Prescott’.29 In our view, both claims are accurate. Calderón, in the process of forging a new persona for the female travel writer, appropriates elements of both the female tradition of the exploratrice sociale and the masculine tradition of Southey, Prescott, and Humboldt. Even as Calderón inscribed the Mexicans firmly into the place of the primitive Other, of course, Mexicans were scripting a national narrative of their own. Since, as we have seen, Calderón does not conform to a traditional ‘English’ perspective, she was viewed with suspicion by Mexicans as well as Europeans and found herself no longer ‘master of all I survey’, but rather an object of the gaze. Just one consequence was that given her American émigré status, she was also seen in her own time as positioning herself squarely on the side of American imperialism; in fact, the ethnographic demarcations she initially constructs and her vivid and detailed landscape descriptions were adapted in the service of American imperialist ambitions to ‘civilize’ and stabilize Mexico during the Mexican-American War, as noted above. In the first half of her narrative, Calderón attempts to conform to the conventions of the female travel narrative, emphasizing domestic interiors, women’s lives, and landscape aesthetics to the exclusion of public life; when discussing the leading politicians she has met, for example, she emphasizes that while she has heard all these men ‘praised or abused [...] I not interfering in Mexican politics, find them amongst the most pleasant of our acquaintances’. (p. 230) As she increasingly adopts an ‘insider’ perspective, however, she finds herself unable to refrain from involvement in Mexican politics. As a result, she must revise the traditional feminine narrative perspective into a more authoritative one that allows women to debate and even participate in politics. She does acknowledge that she breaks boundaries, apologizing to her reader after a long summation of a pronunciamiento or revolution by saying, ‘I shall close this long letter, merely observing, in apology, that as Madame de Staël said, in answer to the remark, that “Women have nothing to do with politics”; — “That may be, but when a woman’s head is about to be cut off, it is natural she should ask — why?” so it appears to me, that when bullets are whizzing about our ears, and shells falling within a few yards of us, it ought to be considered extremely natural, and quite feminine, to inquire into the cause of such phenomena’. (p. 258) As she departs from the typical ‘objective’ and ethnographic gaze of the British traveler, and as she defies the expectation that women writers focus on domestic lives to the exclusion of the public sphere, Calderón confronts the limits of imperial nationalist identity. Her vision of a primitive, 29

Qutd. in Cabañas, p. 19 n. 24.

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picturesque and stable Mexico collapses and both Europe and Mexico return the gaze, making Calderón’s own problematic European identity the object of surveillance. In one telling and oft-cited instance, Calderón has planned to attend a costume ball in the traditional dress of the ‘China Poblana’, which she admired soon after her arrival in Mexico. But she finds, to her surprise, that the upper-class Spaniards and Mexicans alike become unusually invested in her choice of costume. One afternoon a delegation of Spaniards come unexpectedly to call, all of whom seemed anxious to know whether or not I intended to wear a Poblana dress at the fancy ball, and seemed wonderfully interested about it. Two young ladies or women of Puebla, introduced by Señor ——, came to proffer their services in giving me all the necessary particulars, and dressed the hair of Josefa, a little Mexican girl, to show me how it should be arranged; mentioned several things still wanting, and told me that every one was much pleased at the idea of my going in a Poblana dress. I was rather surprised that every one should trouble themselves about it. (p. 88, emphasis ours)

As well she might be, but that is not the end of the day’s surprise visits; later in the afternoon, she learns that Mexican politicians, including the secretary of state, the Ministers of war and of the interior, and others, were in the drawing-room. And what do you think was the purport of their visit? To adjure me by all that was most alarming, to discard the idea of making my appearance in a Poblana dress! They assured us that Poblanas generally were femmes de rien, that they wore no stockings, and that the wife of the Spanish Minister should by no means assume, even for one evening, such a costume. I brought in my dresses, showed their length and their propriety, but in vain; and, in fact, as to their being in the right, there could be no doubt, and nothing but a kind motive could have induced them to take this trouble; so I yielded with a good grace, and thanked the cabinet council for their timely warning [...] They had scarcely gone, when Señor — brought a message from several of the principal ladies here, whom we do not even know, and who had requested, that as a stranger, I should be informed of the reasons which rendered the Poblana dress objectionable in this country, especially on any public occasion like this ball. I was really thankful for my escape. (pp. 88, 89)

Calderón is caught between competing nationalist narratives — for Spanish officials as for Calderón herself, the Mexican peasant is a nostalgic, ‘primitive’ icon, safely removed by spatiotemporal distance from the European self and thus able to be comfortably appropriated. For upper-class Mexicans actively engaged in the process of forging a new national identity that will align them with the European future rather than the American past, the ‘China Poblana’ represents servitude and is therefore to be shunned. Calderón herself becomes a site of surveillance, her body marked by codes

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for European, gendered, and class identities. She is able to ‘escape’ temporarily from this dilemma, but ultimately, she cannot evade these constraints on her behavior. Even as she struggles to establish an authoritative and uncontested identity as observer of Mexicans within Mexico, Calderón’s status becomes further troubled when she finds herself challenged not only in the New World but even back ‘home’ in England. For some readers, seeing Calderón as a ‘Spaniard’ does discredit her as an English woman recording her experiences abroad. By inhabiting this position, Calderón devolves into the position of a foreign other; she can no longer claim the literary perspective of the civilized, European, melancholic traveler. Calderón’s marriage and her hybrid narrative complicate her direct connection to England, potentially making her an anomaly not only in her relation to the English community in Mexico but also in relation to an English readership in England. The most visible example of her reception as an Englishwoman gone native happens in an 1845 Quarterly Review written by Lady Eastlake. Though many British and American reviews were favorable, Eastlake’s approach to Calderón’s journal show us the ways in which Calderón’s own narration may have compromised her claim to an authentic, imperial, and feminine English identity: Though her book engages the attention in a high degree, and it exhibits great and various ability, it fails to interest us in the writer. Something of this, however, may be owing to a reason, which is perhaps meritorious, and certainly fortunate in her as the wife of a foreigner; viz. to the very un-English nature of her writing. Madame Calderón was a Scotchwoman — and a Presbyterian, we have reason to suppose; she is now a Spaniard —and a Roman Catholic, as we have more than reason to suppose. And, accordingly we have a Spanish indifference to bloodshed, a Spanish enthusiasm for bullfighting [...]. (pp. 114-115)

According to the review, Calderón has been too intimately influenced by her contact with the foreign, most obviously by her marriage, and has crossed over the line of acceptable English behavior. If the reviewer considers her text interesting and lively, she also find it decidedly ‘un-English’. Calderón’s focus upon things of ‘Spanish’ interest, her comments on topics that no true English subject would engage, and her ties to what is ‘Roman-Catholic’ and ‘Spanish’ taint her national status. This ‘tainting’ of her nationality also affects her credibility as an objective observer, which in this case reads as ‘English’ writer. And though she is neither Spanish nor at the time Roman Catholic, the reviewer ‘suppose[s]’ her both because her journal exhibits the signs of both in her apparent ‘Spanish indifference to bloodshed’ and in her ‘enthusiasm for bullfighting’. Eastlake argues that Calderón’s marriage has

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made her nature discernibly ‘un-English’ and that this fact is most visibly manifested through her writing. Not only is Calderón’s nationality questionable, but her gender identity is suspect too. After quoting Calderón’s long and vivid description of how bulls are branded in Mexico, Eastlake drily concludes, ‘This is very striking and picturesque writing, and would do admirably under Basil Hall’s, or any other man’s name; but, to our feeling, there is neither a woman’s hand nor heart in it’. (p. 117) Eastlake follows with a discussion of Calderón’s biological nature, concluding that Calderón’s English and womanly ‘nature’ has been ‘altered’. ‘We feel that it is not only a tropical life we are leading, but with the exception of an occasional trait of Scotch shrewdness, and we must say it, Yankee vulgarity, a tropical mind which is addressing us. None other could have entered into the spirit of the people with such mingled ardour and sang froid’. (p. 116, original emphasis) Calderón’s transformation is more than a mere momentary lapse in judgment. Her marriage opens her to the criticism that she has been radically transformed and has acquired the moral characteristics of a Spaniard and, implicitly, a Mexican. She is in danger of being no longer English and of being transformed into a ‘tropical’ foreign other. Eastlake not only considers Calderón’s writing style aesthetically different and ‘vulgar’ — class coding for inferior — but also claims her style as ‘ocular proof’ that Calderón’s ‘English’ and feminine moral constitution has been transfigured. By noting the content and focus of the journal, the review highlights what it conceives of as Calderón’s ‘transformation’ from Englishwoman into something both foreign and masculine — a mere shadow of a former, well-adjusted and predetermined English and female self. Prescott’s celebration of Calderón’s border crossing, when contrasted with Eastlake’s policing of that same violation of gendered and national boundaries, effectively demonstrates the difficulties with which Calderón contends. The impossibility of defending her in-between identity become still more fraught when seen from the Mexican context, where Calderón’s initial alienation from a Mexico she perceives as a site of geographical and temporal displacement — a sleepy, primitive ‘other’ to be contrasted with the advanced civilization, culture and economy of Europe and North America — is not greeted enthusiastically.30 30

‘La North American Review del mes de enero del presente año de 1843; habla con elogio de una obra que se acaba de publicar, y cuyo título es Life en México (Vida en México), escrita por la Sra. Calderón de la Barca, muger [sic] de ministro español, que por el espacio de dos años representó a su gobierno cerca de la república mexicana’. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 17 March 1843, col. 3.

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The first notice of her Life in the Mexican press is positive, though indirect; on 17 March 1843, Mexico City’s leading periodical El Siglo Diez y Nueve, or ‘The Nineteenth Century’, reports that the North American Review speaks highly of Frances Calderón de la Barca’s newly published Life in Mexico (not surprisingly, since the review is by Prescott) and reminds readers also that Calderón was the wife of their Spanish ambassador. A few copies had apparently arrived in the capital and Mexicans read them with enormous interest and some trepidation, which quickly turned to anger. The next month, El Siglo announced its intention of publishing Life in Mexico in serial form and in translation, so that Mexicans who could not read English or obtain a copy of the book could satisfy their ‘natural curiosity’ about a work that had excited ‘major anxiety’ among Mexicans since the first copies of the English version appeared in the capital (28 April 1843). In what seems to be an implicit reference to Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, El Siglo’s editors note that in the half-century since the founding of the United States of America, travelers have published critical accounts of the country’s domestic life that have shaped the ‘peculiar customs’ of North Americans; they meditate more generally on the importance of travel literature in reflecting a nation’s customs and national character back to itself, so that the nation has an opportunity to correct vices and to correct critiques that are incorrect or ill-informed. The editors conclude by anticipating a public outcry by those depicted badly in Calderón’s text and offering El Siglo as a space in which to counter false accusations. El Siglo then goes on to publish just the first four ‘Letters’, or chapters of the Life, before public outrage — battled out across the leading newspapers of the capital — reached such a pitch that the editors abruptly stopped running the serial parts. Ironically, Calderón had barely begun to describe Mexico itself before El Siglo’s part-publication ceased on 24 May 1843; since the first Letters describe the sea voyage and the Calderóns’ stay in Cuba, in the last Letter to be published in Mexico she had only just landed in Veracruz and was enjoying the sea breeze from her balcony. During the month that elapsed between El Siglo’s announcement of its intention to translate and serialize Calderón’s narrative, a violent debate raged across the pages of El Siglo; the official government newspaper, El Diario del Gobierno; the French colony’s newspaper Le Courrier Français; and the Spanish colony’s newspaper La Hesperia. While El Siglo continued to argue that Mexicans had a right — even an obligation — to know how they were represented by the foreign press, El Diario lambasted the book. Angél Calderón de la Barca becomes a particular target of ire for allowing his wife to betray Mexican hospitality as well as the privilege of his diplomatic

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position, and for failing himself to show the dignity and honor of a gentleman by betraying state secrets (the Diario tosses in a quick, but inflammatory, comparison of Ángel Calderón to the reviled French diplomat Baron Deffaudis). Mostly, though, the Diario rails against Frances Calderón de la Barca as an ignorant, vain woman and a ‘bluestocking’ — she is no Madame Sendery, Madame Sevigné, or Mrs. Trollope, they say, because those women at least did not abuse the privilege of their position by revealing insider information to which they should not have been privy; most of all, Calderón is reviled as a betrayer of Mexican generosity and hospitality, and the editors of El Siglo are censured for stooping to print such trash in the first place. And the controversy did not end here; the French and Spanish communities, feeling their own honor under attack, retaliated within the pages of their newspapers; El Siglo responded; the debate dragged on. Throughout these exchanges, two themes emerge. The first is that even as Calderón surveyed Mexico and Mexicans, evaluated their culture, and created a narrative to convey her perspective, Calderón had simultaneously become an object of surveillance by Mexicans themselves. El Diario — to cite just one of a multitude of examples — condemns her as an imprudent woman, merely passing as an aristocrat, whose unjust, passionate, virulent diatribes have compromised her husband’s reputation as an ambassador.31 The second theme dominating these newspaper exchanges is that Mexican national identity is first and foremost in all participants’ minds. Calderón’s supporters and critics alike all see her work as forming an essential part of a larger international discourse about Mexico. Throughout the exchange, gender, class, and nation become trading cards in a search for the stable, modern national identity that will be both constructive at home and respected abroad. As they see their own country and people refracted back through Other eyes, these members of the Mexican elite seek to seize control of the discourse — even as, Janus-faced, it slips from their grasp to circulate once more. Lost in all this uproar is the fact that Calderón’s own text does not continue to satirize or demean Mexico as the narrative progresses. It is true that, as we have shown above, her first impression is a typically imperial one. When Calderón contrasts Mexico’s current (anarchic, disordered) postcolonial reality with the prelapsarian fantasy of its controlled, orderly colonial past, she borrows the rhetoric of Anglo-American imperialism. As 31

‘No acertamos a decidir cual haya sido mayor imprudencia, si la de esa señora, comprometiendo el carácter diplomático de su marido, o la de los que se presentan a poner en manos de todos los mexicanos, las injustas, apasionadas, virulentas diatribas con que la Sra. Calderón ha correspondido a la exquisita y benévola hospitalidad con que ella y su esposo fueron tratados por los generosos vecinos de México.’ El Diario, 30 April 1843.

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she negotiates rapidly shifting nationalist identities, however, Calderón increasingly finds herself at odds with her own subject position. These contradictions in her perception of the Mexican national character also force her to revisit, to reconsider, and even revise her initial views of Mexico and her relationship to it. After her husband learns, in March of 1841, that a new minister has been appointed, the couple must return to the United States. Their journey is delayed only by political unrest, as the centralist president Anastasio Bustamante — then on his third term — is challenged by factions throughout Mexico, with López de Santa Anna finally winning his sixth (but far from last) term as president and facing the challenge of unifying the country while repelling North American aggression. As she muses over her imminent departure, Calderón realizes, ‘It will be impossible for us to leave Mexico without regret. It requires nothing but a settled government to make it one of the first countries in the world. Santa Anna has much in his power. Reste à savoir how he will use that power. Perhaps in these last years of tranquility [sic], which he has spent on his estate, he may have meditated to some purpose’. (pp. 447-48) We now see that what is to be mourned is not a past synchronically situationed Mexico, but rather her distance from what she classifies at the end of her text as its future. By the end of the narrative, Calderón’s unstable subject position has opened up a space for her to envision Mexico not in a nostalgic picturesque past nor as an alienated foreign space in relation to what is European. Rather, Calderón mourns a present, one in which she can no longer participate. And she concludes, in a melancholy, elegiac tone produced this time not by her need to depict Mexico as a geotemporal space far removed from AngloEuropean modernity, but by her sorrow over leaving the true friends she has made in Mexico: ‘I must now conclude my last letter written from this place; for we are surrounded by visitors, day and night; and, to say the truth, feel that it is only the prospect of returning to our family, which can counterbalance the unfeigned regret we feel at leaving our friends in Mexico’. (p. 526) Calderón ends her time in Mexico where she begins it — in Vera Cruz, whence the couple returns en route to the United States. I find, personally, one important change in taste if not in opinion. Vera Cruz cookery, which two years ago I thought detestable, now appears to me delicious! What excellent fish! and what incomparable frijoles! Well, this is a trifle; but after all, in trifles as in matters of moment, how necessary for a traveller to compare his judgments at different periods, and to correct them! First impressions are of great importance, if given only as such; but if laid down as decided opinions, how apt they are to be erroneous! It is like judging of individuals

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by their physiognomy and manners, without having had time to study their character. We all do so more or less, but how frequently we find ourselves deceived! (p. 533)

In this analogy, the individual stands in synecdochally for the nation. Over the course of her two years in Mexico, Calderón has forged close bonds with individual Mexicans; these relationships, as well as the powerful force of mere habit, have allowed her to see this exotic country, with its romantic, melancholy history, differently, even as she herself has mutated to take on new customs, allegiances, and even tastes. In ‘DissemiNation’, his homage to the power of postcolonial migrations, Homi Bhabha concludes, ‘it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity’. (p. 320) Over the course of her residence in Mexico, Calderón has learned to describe the country and its people in ways that help us think through the process of forging a national identity; she has learned to see her own identity — with its ragtag mix of Scottish, English, American, Spanish and now Mexican elements — as both/and rather than either/or; and she has learned that the source of melancholy is not in the landscape, not in the poverty of the people, and not an imagined Aztec past. Rather, melancholy exists in the impossibility of belonging, the necessity of moving on, and the spaces in between.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991) Bhabha, Homi, ed., Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) Caballero, M. Soledad, ‘Gothic Routes, or the Thrills of Ethnography: Frances Calderon de la Barca’s Life in Mexico’, in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, NC: McFarland; 2004), pp. 143-62. Cabañas, Miguel A., ‘North of Eden: Romance and Conquest in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico’, Studies in Travel Writing, 9 (2005), 1-19.

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Calderón de la Barca, Frances, Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in that Country, ed. by Woodrow Borah (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1946) ——, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca with New Material From the Author’s Private Journals, ed. by Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966) Eastlake, Elizabeth, Lady, ‘Lady Travellers’, Quarterly Review, 76 (June 1845), 99-137. Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) Graham, Maria, Journal of a voyage to Brazil, and residence there, during part of the years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: Longman et al. and John Murray, 1824) ——, Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822. And a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman et al. and John Murray, 1824) Jagoe, Eva-Lynn Alicia, ‘‘The Visible Horizon Bounds Their Wishes’: Seclusion and Society in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Postcolonial Mexico’, in Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. by Rita S. Kranidis (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998) Kaplan, Amy and Nina Gerassi-Navarro, ‘Between Empires: Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico’, Symbiosis: A Journal of AngloAmerican Literary Relations, 9.1 (2005), 3-27. Krauze, Enrique, Mexico: Biography of Power: a history of Modern Mexico, 1810-1996, trans. by Hank Heifetz, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997) Leask, Nigel, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) ——, ‘‘The Ghost in Chapultepec’: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts’, in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. by Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 184-209. Lindsay, Claire, ‘Postcolonial Anxieties: Fetishing Frances Calderón de la Barca’, Women: a Cultural Review, 17.2 (2006), 171-187. Mayer, Brantz, Mexico as It Was and as It Is (New York: J. Winchester, New World Press, and London and Paris: Wiley and Putnam, 1844)

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Magoffin, Susan Shelby, Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, 18461847, ed. by Stella M. Drumm (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1962) Miller, Linda Ledford, ‘A Protestant Critique of Catholicism: Frances Calderón de la Barca in Nineteenth Century Mexico’, in Gender, Genre, & Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. by Kristi Siegel (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 225-233. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, London: Routledge, 1992) Pittock, Murray, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2008) Prescott, William Hickling, ‘Life in Mexico during a Residence of Two Years in that Country’, North American Review, 56 (1843), 137-170. Spurr, David, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) Stephens, John L., Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, & Yucatan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949; repr. 1841) Stocking, George W., Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987) Thompson, Waddy, Esq., Recollections of Mexico (New York & London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846)

Jessica Damián

‘These Civil Wars of Nature’: Annotating South America’s Natural and Political History in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) In her Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, Graham manifests a growing preoccupation with the disordered yet interdependent ‘nature’ of her journal entries written from Valparaiso. In this paper I argue that Graham internalizes a fissured narrative approach to record the historical, social, political, and natural aspects of Chilean society at mid-nineteenth century. By evoking the language of earthquakes to describe the climate of instability in revolutionary South America, Graham constructs a fragmented yet curiously unified eyewitness account of Chile’s political and natural history. In the process, the external world of temblores, explosions, and shocks mirrors Graham’s internal world of displacement, preservation, and transformation as a British woman annotating ‘the commotions of nature and of society’ for her European readers across the Atlantic. As this essay suggests, Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile must be considered an important scientific text, for it serves as the only female-authored account of the Chilean earthquake of 1822. Her first-hand experiences not only contributed to the broader Anglo-Hispanic historiography of Chile but also the corpus of scientific papers of the nineteenth century.

‘Earthquake under me, civil war around me […] All this left me with nothing but the very present to depend on; and, like the road I was travelling, what was to come was enveloped in dark clouds, or at best afforded most uncertain glimpses of the possible future’. Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824)

Betraying the excitement one typically feels at the beginning of a new calendar year, the English travel writer Maria Graham (née Dundas, later Calcott, 1785-1842) wrote the following in the pages of her Tuesday, 31 December 1822 journal entry from Valparaiso, Chile: The earth has been pretty quiet during the last days. Once or twice in the course of the day, and generally as often in the night, there are sensible shocks, and still oftener loud noises; but nothing alarming. […] After dinner we generally walk to the sea-side to enjoy the prospect and the music of the sea, which comes, ‘like the joys that are past, sweet and mournful to the soul’. To-day we sat long on the promontory of the Herradura, to see the last sun of 1822 go down into the Pacific, and we watched how long his rays gilded the tops of the Andes after he himself had hid in the ocean. [...] Nay, even the last sun of the last year went down with hope, almost with confidence, for me. [...] Misery and death have been busy with me: my best hopes have been disappointed; and I have to seek new interests, ere life

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itself can be otherwise than burthensome. [...] A silent walk home, with a not unpleasant feeling of sad remembrance, ended this, perhaps the most disastrous, year of my life.1

Stationed at the margins of empire in South America on New Year’s Eve, Graham wished desperately to close the chapter on 1822. It was a year filled with disastrous and shocking events, including the death of her husband, Lieutenant Thomas Graham, a British navy officer who died en route from Brazil to Chile on the H.M.S. Doris, the violent uprisings of the revolutionary wars in Latin America, and dozens of earthquakes whose undulations and explosions caused chasms in the earth. In her Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822, originally published jointly in London by Longman and John Murray, Graham manifests a growing preoccupation with the disordered yet interdependent nature of her journal entries, which she admits are like a ‘picture gallery; where you have historical pieces, and portraits, and landscapes, and still life, and flowers, side by side’ and yet ‘can pretend to no unity of design’.2 (p. 145) I wish to argue that in her Journal, Graham internalizes a fissured narrative approach to record the historical, social, political, and natural aspects of Chilean society at mid-nineteenth century. Graham’s fissured approach to journaling stems from her inability to cope with the natural disasters and earthquakes around her, which erupt without warning and whose mass destruction cause ‘mad disquietude’ in the hearts of British émigrés like her in Valparaiso. Graham’s text, as Jennifer Hayward, Mary Louise Pratt, Ángela Pérez-Mejía, and M. Soledad Caballero have argued, functions at once as travel narrative and autobiography. I believe, however, that we must consider Graham’s Journal as an important scientific text as well, for it serves as the only female-authored account of the Chilean earthquake of 1822. Writing as an amateur geologist, Graham traces the seismic activity which precedes, accompanies, and succeeds the event. By 1824, her detailed observations not only drew attention to Chile’s natural phenomena but also drew the attention of London’s Geological Society, which published an extract of her Journal in its Transactions of the

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Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, ed. by Jennifer Hayward (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp.174-5. Quotations in the text are from this edition unless otherwise noted. Graham became a reader for John Murray, who supplied her with numerous books during her travels. Andya Marchant speculates that Graham “formed a close association with his family, becoming godmother to one of his daughters.” See Marchant, ‘The Captain’s Widow: Maria Graham and the Independence of South America,’ The Americas, 20 (1963), 127-42 (p. 129).

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Geological Society.3 By evoking the language of earthquakes and natural history to describe the climate of instability in revolutionary South America, Graham constructs a fragmented yet curiously unified eyewitness account of Chile’s political and natural history. The external world of temblores, explosions, and shocks, I suggest, mirrors Graham’s internal world of displacement, preservation, and transformation as an English woman recording the ‘commotions of nature and of society’ for her European readers across the Atlantic.4

In This Wide Country On Sunday night, 28 April 1822, Maria Graham disembarked at the harbor in Valparaiso, Chile. Writing was foremost on her mind. She began her first entry with the following pronouncement, ‘Many days have passed, and I have been unable and unwilling to resume my journal. To-day the newness of the place, and all the other circumstances of our arrival, have drawn my thoughts to take some interest in the things around me’. (p. 3) Jennifer Hayward, contemporary editor of Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, notes that the text ‘opens with a very traditional female narrator, one virtually immobilized with grief’ after experiencing her husband’s sudden death a few weeks earlier on 2 April. (p. xix) Graham, Hayward adds, defied convention by refusing to return to England after his passing. Graham had traveled to Chile with her husband, who had been given orders to ‘protect British mercantile interests along the South American coast’. By the nineteenthcentury, Chile was often referred to as ‘the England of South America,’ for it benefited from England’s political, social, and economic exports.5 At the time of Graham’s arrival in Valparaiso, the alliance between Britain and Chile was strong. As Ángela Pérez-Mejía writes in A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780-1849, ‘Britain had supported the South American independence movements with capital, arms,

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5

Maria Graham, “An account of some effects on the late Earthquakes in Chili,” Transactions of the Geological Society (1824), I, 413-15. This paper stems from my research on the transatlantic connections between Britain and nineteenth-century Latin America, especially as the continent fought the Wars of Independence. While my work deals primarily with mining narratives and England’s role in exploration and trade in South America between 1770 and 1860, I am interested here in the link between earthquakes and the shifting nature of the political landscape leading up to the independence movements on the continent. See Hayward’s ‘Introduction,’ in Graham, Journal, p. xviii. See also pp. 294-99.

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and political influence. In particular, a British fleet had helped Chile to defeat Spanish forces in the Pacific’.6 A significant population of British travelers, merchants, mining engineers, and entrepreneurs, whom Pratt refers to as the ‘capitalist vanguard’, dotted the landscape in Chile. Like Graham, many had sailed from Portsmouth to the harbor at Valparaiso. Although she found herself in the role of a widow, or that of an unprotected female traveling abroad, neither travel nor the sea were new to Graham. In 1809, she journeyed to Bombay with her father, Commissioner of the Navy, George Dundas. It was there, en route, for major events in her life happened at sea, that she met and became engaged to Captain Graham. They married in India shortly thereafter. In 1812, after returning to England, Graham published her popular Journal of a Residence in India. Travels to Malta, Gibraltar, Naples, Rome, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil soon followed. Graham loved the sea and the opportunities it afforded her to exercise what the Chilean historian Tomás Lago refers to as a ‘solitary meditation’ in her writing. In his biography of Graham, La Viajera Ilustrada: Vida de María Graham, Lago praises her for the introspective approach that defined her journals. Moreover, he lauds Graham’s inquisitive nature and ardent desire to record, with both panoramic and microscopic detail, the scenery and events before her in Chile. ‘Fue una suerte para Chile su visita. Nunca hubo viajero más interesado en verlo todo, en saberlo todo, en anotarlo todo en una época que es una especie de codo de nuestra historia, cuando empezaban a desarmarse las estructuras establecidas del sistema colonial español, y se iniciaba trabajosamente la vida independiente’.7 The Monthly Review of 1824 anticipated Lago’s nationalistic sentiment when it wrote that Graham’s narrative was ‘strictly original testimony, the record of the evidence of living witnesses; and it will probably be consulted by the future historians of Chile, as fundamental authority for describing the first tottering steps of the infantgiant Independence’. (p. 190) Hayward estimates that ‘of the roughly sixteen narratives written about Chile in the years surrounding its struggle for independence (1810-1825), only one — Graham’s — was written by a woman’.8 (p. viii) ‘Her own story, her own subjectivity,’ she notes, became ‘intimately intertwined with the narrative of Chile’s self-creation’. (p. 297) At the outset of her Journal, Chile itself, the ‘infant-giant’ plays a central role in the text, for it allows Graham to break free from her melancholia, if 6

7 8

Ángela Pérez-Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780-1849 (New York: SUNY Press, 2004), p. 85. Tomás Lago, La Viajera Ilustrada: Vida de María Graham (Santiago: Planeta, 2000), p. 23. Others include Basil Hall’s 1824 Extracts from a journal written on the Coasts of Chile, Peru, and Mexico and John Miers’ 1826 Travels in Chile and La Plata.

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only briefly, for her sadness overwhelms her throughout her stay in Valparaiso. As she begins to describe the majestic cordillera of the Andes, her grief begins to dissipate, as it often does in the face of this remote and awe-inspiring landscape: I can conceive nothing more glorious than the sight of the Andes this morning on approaching the land at day-break; starting, as it were, from the ocean itself, their summits of eternal snow shone in all the majesty of light long before the lower earth was illuminated [...] On anchoring here to-day, the first object I saw was the Chile State’s brig Galvarino, formerly the British brig of war Hecate, the first ship my husband ever commanded, and in which I sailed with him in the Eastern Indian seas. Twelve years have since passed away! (p. 3)

Graham’s descriptions of Chile remain punctuated by elements of political and natural history, represented here in the juxtaposed images of the British brig of war against the snow-capped Andes. Through they run parallel throughout the course of her narrative, each one of these elements, at times, finds itself recorded with greater intensity in the seismogram that is her journal. Much like tectonic plates, they slide and grate past each other, bringing to the surface her observations on the upheavals of man and nature. In the very act of journal writing, Graham emulates the zig-zag pattern of seismic recording as she traces the events around her, which oscillate daily: There are days of hurry and happy occupation, that leave also a hurry of spirits, that permits but the shortest and most concise entries; others there are, where idleness and the selfimportance we all feel, more or less, in writing a journal, swell the pages with laborious trifling; and some, again, where a few short sentences tell of a state of mind that it requires courage indeed to exhibit to another eye. (pp. 27-28)

While some entries are shorter and more intense, others run undisturbed over a period of time. Graham underscores that her descriptions, written in situ, remain accurate and trustworthy for her journal is ‘true to nature’ and ‘true to facts’. (p. 28) In her journal, or seismogram, Graham registers her first earthquake on 9 May, a few days after arriving in Valparaiso. However, the occurrence becomes a passing comment amid details of her domestic and public life in the Almendral. Her numerous accounts on the eating and drinking habits of her Chilean neighbors, for example, showcase what Pratt refers to as Graham’s ‘social explorations.’ As she narrates her experience in seeing mate prepared with a shared bombilla, Graham walks the reader through this foreign landscape and the customs of its people:

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From the garden we entered immediately into the common sitting-room, where, according to custom, one low latticed window afforded but a scanty light. [...] I observed a pot of beautiful flowers, and two pretty-shaped silver utensils, which I at first took for implements of worship, and then for inkstands, but I discovered that one was a little censer for burning pastile, with which the young women perfume their handkerchiefs and mantos, and the other the vase for holding the infusion of the herb of Paraguay, commonly called matee [sic], so universally drank or rather sucked here. The herb appears like dried senna; a small quantity of it is put into the little vase with a proportion of sugar, and sometimes a bit of lemon peel, the water is poured boiling on it, and it is instantly sucked up through a tube about six inches long. This is the great luxury of the Chilenos, both male and female. The first thing in the morning is matee, and the first thing after the afternoon siesta is a matee. I have not yet tasted of it, and do not much relish the idea of using the same tube with a dozen other people. (p. 8)

While the bombilla strikes Graham as unhygienic, her ethnographic interest in these and other social customs shared by the locals and British émigrés in the Almendral dominate the narrative at the outset of the text. Graham also swells the pages of her early journal entries with botanical observations, which she gathers with as much care as she does her plant specimens.9 In Chile she collects culen, litri, algarobilla, quilo, yerba mora, manzanilla, and palqui, among others. Graham takes issue with the nomenclature of botany, however, for she believes that its specialized terminology alienates men and women from nature: I am sorry I know so little of botany, because I am really fond of plants. But I love to see their habits, and to know their countries and their uses; and it appears to me that the nomenclature of botany is contrived to keep people at a distance from any real acquaintance with one of the most beautiful classes of objects in nature. What have harsh hundred syllabled names have to do with such lovely things as roses, jasmines, and violets? (p. 35)

Pérez-Mejía suggests that what Graham ‘learns about local uses of plants allows her to make sociological comparisons with Europe, and to tell stories that combine local color and a certain sense of humor’. (p. 89) The Monthly Review of 1824, in fact, commended Graham for her story-telling talents, noting that her journal was ‘every where entertaining and full of novel delineations’. (p. 200) Graham’s interest in the sciences, on the other hand, allows her to construct a geographical and geological map of Chile which takes into account the soon-to-be explosive landscape on the continent. The seismic activity recorded in her journal would soon peak.

9

Graham’s rich collection of botanical line drawings and watercolor paintings of Valparaiso can be found in the British Museum, bestowed to the Reading Room after her death. See Lago, p. 76.

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The Ground is Still Trembling Under Me The tumultuous political movements of the period, which Graham witnessed and recorded from Chile, heralded the continent’s emancipation from Spain. Her increasing interest in the ‘general cause of South American independence’ begins to displace the earlier ethnographic details in her journal, as she turns instead to the political climate of Chile. (p. 28) ‘The good cause of independence,’ she writes, must lead the South American colonies to secure their ‘civil liberty, and all its attendant blessings, will come in time’. (p. 30) Pratt reminds us that Maria Graham was already an ‘experienced traveler, travel writer, and political observer’ by the time of her South American sojourn.10 Steeped in the naval backgrounds of her father and husband, in addition to her own travels in Europe and India, Graham and her political acumen were firmly in place when she disembarked in Valparaiso. And while she did not travel to the continent as an emissary of empire per se, her husband’s political alliances ensured that she would remain wellconnected to Chile’s prominent social circles. Graham privileges her position as an eye-witness to history, offering freely her English views of Chilean nationalism and the nascent South American revolutions. She receives the rare opportunity of visiting the Consulado and participating in the deliberations of the national representative assembly. Graham is well-versed on the Political Constitution of Chile, being privy to its eight sections, chapters, and articles through her association with the figure of Lord Cochrane, British naval commander and Admiral of the Chilean Navy.11 Graham reads the Political Constitution with a ‘considerable degree of interest’ for she understands that in the terrain of British-Chilean relations, she now forms part of a broader political map: I remember the time when I should as little have thought of reading the reglamento of Chile, as I should of poring over the report of a committee of turnpike roads in a distant country; and far less should I have dreamed of occupying myself with the Constitución Política del estado de Chile. But, times and circumstances make strange inroads on one’s habits both of being and thinking; and I have actually caught myself reading, with a considerable degree of interest, the said Political Constitution. [...] It begins by asserting the freedom and independence of Chile as a nation, and with defining the limits of the territory, fixing Cape Horn as its southern point, and the desert of Atacama as its northern boundary; while the

10

11

Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.157. Graham reads the Constitution in Spanish. Throughout her travels in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, Graham perfected her language skills in French, Arabic, Sanskrit, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.

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Andes to the east, and the ocean to the west, form its natural limits. It claims besides, the islands of the archipelago of Chiloe, those of Mocha, of Juan Fernandez, and Saint Mary. (pp. 138-39)

As she begins to expand her political and cartographic borders, attempting to situate herself on terra firma in Chile, Graham and the inhabitants of the Almendral find themselves rattled by severe earthquakes. The frequency of Graham’s political observations coincides with the sharp increase of seismic activity in Valparaiso. As the pace towards civil war quickens, so, too, does the earth. From July 1822 onward, until her departure from Chile in February of 1823, Graham’s accounts are no longer defined by social vignettes but rather dozens of accounts of earthquakes, which she feels ‘rock the very foundations of the globe’. (p. 53) Whereas her first earthquake barely registered on her seismogram, subsequent occurrences leave a lasting record or trace on her entries, which begin to shorten considerably as Graham shifts her focus from surveying the landscape to surviving in it. The random yet sustained seismic movements in the Almendral make Graham ‘feel anew that utter helplessness which is so appalling’. (p. 152) On 16 July 1822 she writes, for example, We have had two slight shocks of an earthquake to-day. The sensations occasioned by them are particularly disagreeable. In all other convulsions of nature it seems possible to do, or at least attempt, something to avert danger. We steer the ship in a storm for a port; our conductors promise to lead the lightning harmless from our heads: but [...] escape or shelter seems equally impossible. (p. 53)

Some of her journal entries are shorter still, giving readers a glimpse into her mounting anxiety, for Graham never knows when the next aftershock will occur: Thursday, 5th December. — We are again more quiet; only three slight shocks to-day. December 7th — A slight shock at six a.m, immediately followed by a severe one; and another in the evening. Sunday, 8th. — A very severe shock. December 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th. — There have been four shocks each day, accompanied by much noise; and we have heard several explosions, without feeling any motion, like the noise of heavy guns at sea. Thursday, 19th — One long shock, with a very loud noise, and several slight shocks. (pp. 167, 169, 170)

The struggle for self-preservation in the face of an inhospitable landscape leads Graham to undertake the work of a geologist-in-training as she learns to

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‘read the signs’ of earthquakes, including tracing the chasms impressed upon the landscape and noting the thunderous discharge of noise, which she compares to artillery fire. She records the equivalent of modern-day field observations by measuring distances, making meteorological commentaries, distinguishing between types of motions, and comparing the duration of shocks. Mary and Thomas Creese have argued in ‘British Women Who Contributed to Research in the Geological Sciences in the Nineteenth Century,’ that women who carried out work in geology between 1800 and 1900 formed part of two distinct groups: the amateurs and the formal university-trained professionals.12 They believe that Maria Graham belongs to the former category as a self- or privately-taught individual who observes, collects, and classifies information. Those in the latter category ‘appeared in increasing numbers from the 1880s onwards, following the establishment of the women’s colleges at Cambridge’ and ‘the improvement of one or two already in existence in London’.13 The Creeses suggest that the work of professionals ‘marked the beginning of a remarkable change in the pattern of women’s participation in geological research’, as their collective efforts close to the turn of the century ‘accounted for no less than half of the nineteenth-century journal publications in geology by British women’.14 The work of Maria Graham as a self-taught amateur, they contend, deserves equal attention in the scientific arena for it ‘concerned no quiet backwater but related directly to central questions that were of major interest to the leading geologists of the time’.15 Indeed, her first-hand experiences not only contributed to the broader Anglo-Hispanic historiography of Chile but also the corpus of scientific papers of the nineteenth century. She set a coda for geologists who followed her work on the South American continent. Graham undertakes numerous informal geological surveys during a time of heightened seismic activity in the final months of 1822. On Monday, 9 December, Lord Cochrane accompanies Graham as she travels to the beach at Valparaiso ‘chiefly for the purpose of tracing the effects of the earthquake 12

13 14 15

Mary R. S. Creese and Thomas M. Creese, ‘British Women Who Contributed to Research in the Geological Sciences in the Nineteenth Century,’ The British Journal for the History of Science, 27 (March 1994), 23-54. The Creeses found that in the Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800-1900, the nineteen-volume international index brought out by the Royal Society, ‘produced a collection of almost 4000 titles of papers by about 1000 nineteenthcentury women authors. Out of 181 geology papers in this collection, 118 (65 per cent) were by British women’. p. 23. Creese, p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 30.

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along the rocks’. (p. 167) She records ‘considerable cracks’ in the earth, compares fractures between rock formations, and speculates on the elevation of the coastline after the earthquake. Her language remains technical yet accessible to her readers throughout: Monday, 9th. — One very slight shock; the day dull and cloudy; the thermometer at 65º Fahrenheit. [...] At Valparaiso, the beach is raised about three feet, and some rocks are exposed, which allows the fishermen to collect the clam, or scallop shell-fish, which were not supposed to exist there before. We traced considerable cracks in the earth all the way between the house and the beach, about a mile, and the rocks have many evidently recent rents in the same direction: it seemed as if we were admitted to the secrets of nature’s laboratory. Across the natural beds of granite, there are veins from an inch to a line in thickness. [...] The cracks of this earthquake are sharp and new, and easily to be distinguished from older ones: they run, besides, directly under the neighboring hills, where the correspondent openings are much wider [...] On our return, I picked up on the beach, in a little cove where there is a colony of fishermen, a quantity of sand, or rather of iron dust, which is very sensible to the magnet. It exactly resembles some that was brought me from the Pearl Islands lately. Here the rocks are of grey granite [...] some of these upwards of 50 feet above the present beach. Nothing can be more lovely than the evening and morning scenery here. (pp. 167-68)

As a significantly longer journal entry in her seismogram, the 9 December annotations demonstrate the extent to which Graham constructs well-founded scientific speculations within the space of ‘nature’s laboratory.’ On several beach expeditions she remarks on the elevation of the coastline shortly after an earthquake. Her observations regarding the rise in the level of the coast, the Creeses point out, proved particularly important to H. Warburton, vicepresident of the London Geological Society, who requested and published an extract of her Chilean Journal. By the time of its publication in 1824, she had become the first woman to publish an article in the male-dominated scientific periodical Transactions. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, the ‘idea of massive uplift of major blocks of land as the result of seismic activity’ remained a contested theory.16 Although she was not a university-trained professional, Graham’s writings on the elevation of land by earthquakes placed her squarely within a controversial scientific debate. One of the most vocal attacks against her came from George Bellas Greenough, president of the Geological Society of London, who questioned the validity of Graham’s eye-witness accounts, even as she claimed that her journal was ‘true to nature’ and ‘true to facts.’ During his presidential address to the Society in 1834, Greenough ‘proceeded to ridicule Mrs Graham’s ability to draw trustworthy conclusions about 16

Creese, p. 29.

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scientific matters, even questioning the veracity, as well as the accuracy, of almost all her observations’.17 Graham had an opportunity to respond to Greenough’s accusations in a ‘well-argued, point by point rebuttal’ in which she defended her Chilean findings.18 The issue of gender, Martina KölblEbert speculates in ‘Observing Orogeny: Maria Graham’s Account of the Earthquake in Chile in 1822’, played an important role in Greenough’s attack. Although ‘there is no direct hint of her sex’, Kölbl-Ebert notes, ‘he clearly implies that evidence by male navy officers would be much more acceptable’.19 Writing as a ‘female, non-geologist, non-official, and somewhat-lower-class Maria Graham’, Greenough believed, made her scientific findings suspect. Graham, however, participated as an important carrier of knowledge about the continent and its volatile political and geological landscape. Although an amateur geologist, her detailed observations, especially those concerned with sound and frequency, echo those of Europe’s most prominent and prolific of scientific travel writers, Alexander von Humboldt. In the 1820s, Graham was not wholly unfamiliar with Humboldt’s works. We know of at least two occasions when she learned about his Central and South American expeditions. Lago writes in La Viajera Ilustrada that Doctor Ross, her physician in Edinburgh, introduced Graham to Humboldt’s travels as a way to lift her spirits in times of prolonged illness: Todos sabían que era una enferma especial a la que sólo había que darle descanso y algún analgésico. El mejor analgésico eran libros en lenguas extranjeras, sobre cualquier tema. Su viejo amigo el doctor Ross, que la conocía bien, le prestó El Mercurio Peruano en español y le conversó acerca de las expediciones de Humboldt por América Central, cuando ya estaba mejor.20

Dr. Ross, who knew her well, cultivated her enthusiasm for science and travel. The second occasion comes from the Journal itself when Mr. Bennett, Lord Cochrane’s Spanish secretary, whom Graham meets in Valparaiso, speaks to her about Humboldt’s travels in the Americas. Bennett relates his own descent into the crater of Pinchincha, a more significant feat, he claims, than ‘where Humboldt had left his mark’ on the volcano of Chimborazo. (Graham, p. 149) In Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the 17 18 19

20

Creese, p. 30. Ibid. M. Kölbl-Ebert, ‘Observing Orogeny: Maria Graham’s Account of the Earthquake in Chile in 1822.’ International Geoscience 22 (1999), p. 38. Lago, p. 96. Graham suffered from tuberculosis throughout her life. She felt the first symptoms in Edinburgh.

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Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, translated by Helen Maria Williams and published in eight volumes between the years 1814-1829, the Prussian scientist registered in his travelogues the atmospheric conditions that precede earthquakes. Of these, he is most descriptive about the sounds or bramidos that burst from the depths of the earth, which he attributes to elastic fluids beneath the earth’s surface. During his stay in Cumaná, Venezuela, Humboldt writes: The underground noise so frequently heard during earthquakes is not usually related to the strength of the shocks. At Cumaná the noise constantly preceded the shocks, while at Quito, and recently at Caracas and in the West Indies, a noise like the discharge of a battery of guns was heard a long time after the shocks had ended. A third kind of phenomenon, and the most remarkable of all of them, is the rolling of those underground thunders that last several months without being accompanied by the slightest tremors. (p. 62)

These bramidos are the same sounds Graham hears on various occasions in Valparaiso, especially on 30 November: 30th. — Before ten o’clock, and at two, shocks accompanied with an unusually loud noise: it is seldom that any shock is entirely without. Sometimes a sound like an explosion takes place before the shock; sometimes a kind of rumbling noise accompanies it; and we often hear the sound without being sensible of any motion, though the quicksilver in the decanter is perceptibly agitated. (p. 162)

Graham, like Humboldt, undertakes numerous expeditions to understand the patterns which nature leaves behind after an earthquake. She observes and tries to make sense of a ‘nature gone out of control’.21 Ultimately, by learning to read the landscape in its heightened state of seismic activity, Graham equates the unstable land masses of the continent to the unstable political climate in Chile. Each one erupts at a moment’s notice, collapsing the rigid rock and social strata in Valparaiso.

Earthquake Under Me, Civil War Around Me As the cry for independence goes forth in Chile, Graham feels optimistic for the people of South America but ambivalent about the civil strife to come. She relishes the opportunity of seeing that the British-Chilean alliance which she fosters in the Almendral and its neighboring towns enables ‘the star of freedom’ to appear ‘on their horizon, — not again to set at the bidding of 21

Pérez-Mejía, p. 100.

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Spain’. (p. 165) When Graham proclaims that ‘the iron scepter of the mothercountry’ will never again ‘be stretched out over these lands,’ she reaffirms Britain’s commitment to the cause of Latin America’s independence. On the other hand, the very thought of war brings her back to a state of anxiety, for she is reminded of her status as an ‘unprotected widow,’ a term Lord Cochrane invokes on 20 December when he persuades Graham to depart from Valparaiso: Lord Cochrane came up to me where I stood, and gently calling my attention, said, that as he was going to sail soon from this country, I should take a great uneasiness from his mind if I would go with him. He could not bear, he said, to leave the unprotected widow of a British officer thus on the beach, and cast away as it were in a ruined town, a country full of civil war! (p. 171)

The sounds of explosions and artillery fire which emanate from the earth serve as precursors to the violent uprisings to come. Graham senses this mounting pressure and responds by taking arms against ‘all the commotions of nature and of society’. (p. 171) She writes on 17 December, ‘We begin to feel the anxieties preparatory to a civil war. Our pistols are cleaned; we have prepared a store of bullets: we feel an unusual uneasiness’. (p. 170) And despite her best efforts to maintain an internal sense of peace amidst an ominous external landscape, she cannot escape the ‘fresh reports of wars and rumours of wars’ which she receives every hour. (p. 173) By the end of her narrative, Graham abandons her home in the Almendral altogether. Prior to her departure from Valparaiso aboard the frigate Montezuma, she sleeps in a makeshift tent and lives a ‘wild life’ in the open air. The experience brings her closer to the landscape which she observed, classified, and recorded in her journal entries. On her last geological expedition near the harbor, she traces the effects of the recent earthquake and fancies that ‘they lead to marks of others infinitely more violent, and at periods long anterior to our knowledge’. (p. 177) This final observation which links the revolutions of man and nature through time tells us a great deal about a continent and a woman at unrest.

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Bibliography Caballero, Soledad M., ‘“For the Honour of Our Country:” Maria Dundas Graham and the Romance of Benign Domination’, Studies in Travel Writing, 9 (2005), 111-31. Creese, Mary R. S. and Thomas M. Creese, ‘British Women Who Contributed to Research in the Geological Sciences in the Nineteenth Century’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 27 (1994), 23-54. Graham, Maria, Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, ed. by Jennifer Hayward (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003) Humboldt, Alexander von., Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. 1814-1829, ed. by Jason Wilson and Malcolm Nicolson (New York: Penguin, 1995) ‘Journal of a Residence in Chile, during the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823. By Maria Graham’, Monthly Review, 106 (1824), 189-200. Kölbl-Ebert, M., ‘Observing Orogeny: Maria Graham’s Account of the Earthquake in Chile in 1822’, International Geoscience, 22 (1999), 36-40. Lago, Tomás, La Viajera Ilustrada: Vida de María Graham (Santiago: Planeta, 2000) Marchant, Andya, ‘The Captain’s Widow: Maria Graham and the Independence of South America’, The Americas, 20 (1963), 127-42. Pérez-Mejía, Ángela, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780-1849 (New York: SUNY Press, 2004) Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Fernando González Moreno DQG Beatriz González Moreno

(Re) Discovering Spain: English Travellers and the Belated Picturesque Tour During the nineteenth century, travellers undertaking the Grand Tour changed their itineraries to discover and directly experience a new category of aesthetic taste establishing a “Picturesque Tour” through Greece, South Africa, South Italy, Turkey and, of course, Spain. British travellers such as Thomas Roscoe (The Tourist in Spain, 1836; with drawings by David Roberts), George Borrow (The Bible in Spain, 1843), or Richard Ford (A Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain, 1845) contributed to portray Spain as a paradigm of the picturesque. This idea would be reaffirmed by travellers interested in describing and painting Spanish landscapes, ruins and characters (bandits, gypsies, bullfighters), and by a prolific literary production, almost a new genre by itself, whose principal aim was to spread this new picturesque universe. By the end of the nineteenth century a new destination began to be discovered: La Mancha. This part of Spain was already well known to the English public thanks to Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote (1605 and 1615); however, travellers, seeing this book almost like a travel guide through the most picturesque places (inns, castles, villages), began to follow don Quixote’s steps.

The outstanding parody created by William Combe in 1809, The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque: A Poem, exemplifies the extent to which England suffered from an aesthetic malady at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fashion that had allowed English people to rediscover not only their own country, but also the rest of Europe through the category of the picturesque.1 Dr Syntax declares: ‘I’ll ride and write, and sketch and print, | And thus create a real mint; | I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there, | And picturesque it everywhere’.2 His aim to ride and sketch the plain and the English lakes drove many travellers, writers, and painters at the time to discover the most ‘picturesque’ corners of the most ‘picturesque’ countries. At the end of the sixteenth century, travel writing as a genre underwent an important development parallel to the popularization of the Grand Tour. The itinerary that included Holland, France, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy served 1

2

The poem first appeared in monthly instalments in Rudolph Ackermann’s Poetical Magazine with coloured designs by Rowlandson under the title of The Schoolmaster’s Tour. The first edition of the complete poem was published in 1812 by Ackermann (London). Combe also wrote The Second Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of Consolation, a Poem (1820) and Third Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of a Wife, a Poem (1821), also published by Ackermann and illustrated by Rowlandson. Combe, William, The Three Tours of Dr. Syntax: in Search of the Picturesque, of Consolation, and of a Wife (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895), I, p. 5.

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as an educational rite of passage for young British gentlemen.3 Such an educational adventure was also hard and dangerous, since it was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that roads were paved and the Tour became a fashion for wealthy dilettantes. The curious gaze of foreigners passing by, who ‘acknowledged’ the Other’s virtues and ‘criticized’ vices, defined a country’s features as much as its inhabitants. Authors reflected on their impressions of the landscape of the country they were visiting, giving ‘first hand’ accounts of the customs and traditions of the inhabitants. Their reflections often presented an imaginary construct, the consequence of an aesthetically mediated inward eye. The most immediate effect resulting from the close relationship between literature and travel was the mass consumption of travel writing as a genre, which increased during the eighteenth century, when the arts found new ways of expression. The eighteenth century came to defy the traditional realm of beauty and taste: the sublime and the picturesque opened new horizons for issues of taste previously ignored.4 The Grand Tour was also modified in accordance with these new categories: Italy and France, traditional epitomes of the beautiful, were revisited under the syntax of the sublime and the picturesque, and awakened the interest of travellers who sought snowy peaks and thundering storms, or adventures with banditti. The pre-eminence of one category over the others in different countries had been pointed out by Immanuel Kant in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763): ‘Of the peoples of our part of the world, in my opinion those who distinguish themselves among all others by the feeling for the beautiful are the Italians and the French, but by the feeling for the sublime, the Germans, English, and Spanish’.5 Focusing on the Spanish character, the German philosopher declares:

3 4

5

The term ‘Grand Tour’ was coined by Richard Lassels in his The Voyage of Italy (1670). For an analysis of the development of the sublime during the Romantic period, see Beatriz González Moreno, Lo sublime, lo gótico y lo romántico: la experiencia estética en el romanticismo inglés (Cuenca: Servicio Publicaciones UCLM, 2007). Edmund Burke defined the sublime in his Philosophical Enquiry (1757) as: ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime’. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. by Alan Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 36. On the coexistence of the three categories, see Nicola Trott, ‘The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 72-90. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (London: University of California Press, 1991), p. 97.

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In the national character that bears the expression of the sublime, this is either that of the terrifying sort, which is a little inclined to be adventurous, or it is a feeling for the noble, or for the splendid. I believe I have reason to be able to ascribe the feeling of the first sort to the Spaniard […] Nothing can be more set against all art and science than an adventurous taste, because this distorts nature, which is the archetype of all the beautiful and noble. Hence the Spanish nation has displayed little feeling for the beautiful arts and sciences […] The Spaniard is earnest, taciturn, and truthful. There are few more honest merchants in the world than the Spanish. He has a proud soul and more feeling for great than for beautiful actions.6

Given such statements, travellers looking for the adventurous would come to Spain, an alternative destination to the traditional Grand Tour. Although Kant refers to the ‘adventurous sublime’, Spain did not really offer travellers landscapes such as the ones provided by the Alps, whose crossing was indeed adventurous. Spain would come instead under the scope of the picturesque, a category poised between the beautiful and the sublime. ‘The chief guardians of the picturesque’, as Nicola Trott observes, ‘were William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight’.7 The picturesque became a way of looking at landscape using criteria drawn from painting, and variety became the keystone for such compositions. In Gilpin’s On Picturesque Beauty (1794), he observes: We are most delighted, when some grand scene, tho’ perhaps of incorrect composition, rising before the eye, strikes us beyond the power of thought — when the vox faucibus haeret; and every mental operation is suspended. In this pause of intellect; this deliquium of the soul, an enthusiastic sensation of pleasure overspreads it, previous to any examination by the rules of art. The general idea of the scene makes an impression, before any appeal is made to the judgment. We rather feel, than survey it.8

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Kant, pp. 98-100. Trott, p. 75. Uvedale Price, in An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful (1794) pointed out that ‘that term is applied only to objects of sight [...] I am therefore persuaded that the two opposite qualities of roughness, and of sudden variation, joined to that of irregularity, are the most efficient causes of the picturesque. [...] Picturesque appears to hold a station between beauty and sublimity’, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 271-272. Rev. William Gilpin was in many ways the inventor of the picturesque tour. See Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1782), Observations Relative to Picturesque Beauty on the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland (1786), Remarks on Forest Scenery and other Woodland Views (1791), and Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; On Sketching Landscape (1792). Gilpin, William, Five Essays on Picturesque Subjects (London: Cadell and Davies, 1808), pp. 49-50.

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Figure 1. ‘The Bridge of Salamanca’, from Picturesque Europe, vol 3 (c. 1870)

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Gilpin’s travel is not concerned with the great historical loci whose contemplation leads us to the beautiful, academic, classical and intellectually appealing, but to a simple walk through nature: This great object we pursue through the scenery of nature. We seek it among all the ingredients of landscape: trees, rocks, broken-grounds, woods, rivers, lakes, plains, valleys, mountains, and distances. These objects in themselves produce infinite variety. No two rocks, or trees are exactly the same […]. Nor is there in travelling a greater pleasure, than when a scene of grandeur bursts unexpectedly upon the eye, accompanied with some accidental circumstance of the atmosphere, which harmonizes with it, and gives it double value […]. Thus universal are the objects of picturesque travel. We pursue beauty in every shape; through nature, through art; and all its various arrangements in form, and colour; 9 admiring it in the grandest objects, and not rejecting it in the humblest.

Looking for simplicity, for a something between beauty and sublimity, English Romantic travellers paved the way for new itineraries among which Spain became an epitome of the picturesque. Its bandits, gipsies, and smugglers tainted paths with excitement and danger, which appealed greatly to the Romantic imagination. Variety and novelty were the landmark of an exotic country where the different regions aroused a feeling of curiosity, ‘which gives play to the mind, loosening those iron bonds with which astonishment chains up its faculties’.10 One of the first English pioneers of Spanish picturesque iconography was the painter David Roberts, who sketched all of Spain’s ‘picturesque’ places. In fact, ‘the art of sketching’, Gilpin declares, ‘is to the picturesque traveller what the art of writing is to the scholar. Each is equally necessary to fix and communicate its respective ideas’.11 Roberts arrived in Spain at the beginning of 1833 to carry out a series of drawings, sketches and watercolours of Granada and La Alhambra — evocative landmarks of the Moorish influence on the South of Spain — to be published in Jenning’s Landscape Annual for 1835, devoted to Granada and Picture Sketches in Spain (1837-38). From then on, Andalucía was immediately identified as the most picturesque part of Spain, and, as a result, its most representative. Mid-century travellers also played an active role in creating an equivalence between Andalucía and Spain, such as George Borrow, with The Zincali (1841) and The Bible in Spain (1843), and Richard Ford’s Handbook 9 10

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Ibid., 42. Uvedale Price, ‘An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful’, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. by A. Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 274. Gilpin, p. 61.

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for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home (1845).12 Borrow’s Bible is not only a detailed description of his eventful journey, but also one of the most interesting depictions of the variety and roughness of Spain, very much in tune with picturesqueness. Borrow describes his work as ‘consisting of descriptions of scenery, sketches of character’, paying special attention to the variety of the Spanish provinces: ‘aguadores of Asturias, […], caleseros of Valencia, […] beggars of La Mancha, […] valets from the mountains, mayordomos and secretaries from Biscay and Guipuzcua, toreros from Andalusia, reposteros from Galicia, shopkeepers from Catalonia! […] Castilians, Estremenians, and Aragonese, of whatever calling! And lastly, genuine sons of the capital, rabble of Madrid, ye twenty thousand manolos — men and women rather picturesque than exemplary — ’.13 And last but not least, Borrow evokes the magnificent remnants of Moorish culture: ‘No one should visit Seville without paying particular attention to the alcazar, that splendid specimen of Moorish architecture’. Referring to Cordova, he writes ‘little can be said with respect to the town of Cordova, which is mean, dark, gloomy place, full of narrow streets and alleys, without squares or public buildings worthy of attention, save and except its far-famed cathedral; its situation, however, is beautiful and picturesque’.14 Since variety and contrast were two features pursued by picturesque travellers, the simplistic and reductionist equation between Spain and Andalucía was rejected by other travellers who proposed an alternative journey from North to South, such as Nathaniel Armstrong Wells in The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain; described in a Series of Letters, with Illustrations representing Moorish Palaces, Cathedrals, and other Monuments of Art (1846). The importance of this work lies in the illustrations the author himself carried out and in his description of these two new itineraries.15 In the first part, the author recommends arriving in Spain by sea, reaching the Basque provinces, since ‘the provinces of the Peninsula which combine the greater number of requisites for the enjoyment of life with the most attractive specimens of the picturesque, whether natural or artificial, are those nearest to the coast’, but the feeling is not diminished if one reaches 12

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The Handbook was the result of Ford’s stay in Spain from 1830 to 1833, travelling by Andalucía, Asturias, Basque Country, Extremadura, and Old Castile. George Borrow (1843), The Bible in Spain; or, the Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (London: John Murray, 1899), pp. xiv, 173-174. Borrow, pp. 216, 238. Ten engravings on steel by William Francis Starling and nineteen wood engravings by Thomas Gilks.

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Bayonne in the Diligence, since ‘from the first view of Spanish ground, the monotony of the landscape ceases, and gives place to picturesque scenery’.16 A perfect example of this ‘scenery’ is Hernani’s main street described by Wells as ‘a perfect specimen of picturesque originality’ due to the striking effect of its emblazoned old façades, the different variety of heights in its roofs, the small square by the hill, the old sculptures and the arched gateway of a Gothic castle.17 Later on, Wells completes the itinerary in Burgos, whose Cartuja de Miraflores is described as ‘the most picturesque [spot] to be found in the environs of Burgos’ not only for the quality of its art, but also for its historical reminiscences. (p. 70) Madrid is then portrayed as ‘an elegant and brilliant city, and a very agreeable residence; but for the admirer of the picturesque, or the tourist in search of historical souvenirs, it contains few objects of attraction’ (p. 92); and finally Toledo. This Castilian city embodies the picturesque through its bridges, ‘both highly picturesque, from their form no less than their situation’ (p. 105), its location near the banks of the river Tajo, ‘ornamented, close to a cascade, with a picturesque ruin’ (p. 107), and, of course, its monuments full of legends, relics of the Roman, Arab, Jewish, and Christian cultures once settled there. These included the Cathedral and the Alcázar or San Juan de los Reyes, whose ‘picturesque position lends a charm to the melancholy and deserted remains still visible of its grandeur’. (p. 178) Wells also includes Valladolid, Zaragoza and Tudela, but he pays them less attention. The second part of the book is focused on Seville and the relics that Moorish art has left behind. He also includes a chapter that, like Borrow, exalts the variety, peculiarities and contradictions of the Spanish people and provinces, resulting in a paradigmatic image of the picturesque: a mosaic where even beggars are ‘one of the Curiosities — and not the least picturesque one — of this antique country’. (p. 369) Travel writing generated such a great public demand that English editors began to issue a new kind of publication, different from written travel books as such, to bring the public closer to the picturesque corners of Europe. These publications were in folio format, and gave illustrations pride of place; xylographies and engravings on steel alternated with the text. The greatest exponent of this kind of publication was Picturesque Europe, opus magna with illustrations on steel and wood by the most eminent artists, and edited by

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Wells, pp. 9, 17. Ibid., pp. 19-20.

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Cassell, Peter & Galpin as a monthly serial during the decade of 1870.18 Spain is divided into three main parts in this work: South, Centre, and North; nevertheless, each region is treated differently and, as a result of the prevailing taste, greater importance is given to the Southern part. Travel around the South of Spain begins in the fourth volume, where a whole chapter is devoted to Córdova, Seville, and Cádiz, and goes on in the fifth volume with two more chapters, ‘Gibraltar and Ronda’ and ‘Granada and the East Coast of Spain’. 19 Major Arthur Griffiths, the author of these chapters, was a veteran of the Crimean war who travelled in Spain just before assuming charge of the British prison at Gibraltar, where he initiated a lifelong career as a prison inspector. The military history of the place compelled him to declare that ‘Andalusia, the southernmost, is in many respects the most interesting province of Spain’.20 Even at the end of his life, he recalled ‘our entry into the Great Park that surrounds the famous Moorish Palace, under the abundant shade of the close-grown trees, first planted by our great Duke of Wellington.’21 The illustrations that accompany each chapter, drawn by Harry Fenn and Carl Werner and engraved on steel by Thomas Heawood and on wood by Whymper, are summaries of picturesque iconography: views and landscapes in which nature’s magnitude and variety appeals to emotions rather than to intellect and cause astonishment, such as the magnificent views of Gibraltar and Spain and Gibraltar and Africa.22 ‘[T]he great rock itself presents a series of unrivalled pictures. It has an entirely different shape from different points of view’.23 A series of elements included in the landscape convey a

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The series was published c. 1876-79, and comprises five volumes: The British Isles, 2 vols, and Continental Europe, 3 vols. It was reissued later on by Cassell & Company: London, Paris, New York, Melbourne (c. 1892-97). Other chapters are devoted to Auvergne and Dauphiné, Old Germany Towns, Naples, Norway, Spain (New Castile and Estremadura), The Lake of Geneva, The Frontiers of France (East and South), North Italy, The Channel Islands, Norway (The Sogne Fjord, Nord Fjord, Romsdal), the Frontiers of France (West and North), Calabria and Sicily, and the Black Forest. Chapters on Sweden, The Tyrol, Dresden and the Saxon Switzerland, Eastern Switzerland, Constantinople, Belgium, The High Alps, Russia, The Jura, Athens and its Environs, Holland, and the Danube are included in the same volume. Arthur Griffiths, ‘Spain: Cordova, Seville and Cadiz’, in Picturesque Europe (London, Paris & Melbourne: Cassell and Company Limited, vol. IV, c.1870c), p. 215. See Arthur Griffiths, Fifty Years of Public Service (London, Paris, New York: Cassell and Company, 1904), p. 118. Karl Werner or Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner. Arthur Griffiths, ‘Gibraltar and Ronda’, in Picturesque Europe (London: Cassell, Peter and Galpin, vol. V, c.1870a), p. 42.

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Figure 2. ‘Gibraltar, from Gaucin,’ from Picturesque Europe, vol 5 (c. 1870)

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sense of variety, such as small buildings, ruins, carts, boats or other human constructions. Nature reinforces the scene’s contrasts — for example, boulders with quaint weather-worn outlines that ‘add greatly to the picturesqueness of the scene’.24 The depiction of ravines with small ruins and fortresses bears a resemblance to some of the sketches drawn by Gilpin when exemplifying picturesque sketching.25 Even the anecdotal presence of draught animals, as in The Cathedral, Cadiz; Windmill Hill Road; or Gibraltar, North Front, becomes a typical element of the picturesque landscape; Gilpin points out that ‘as an object of picturesque beauty, we admire more the worn-out cart-horse, the cow, the goat or the ass’.26 A variety of Spanish characters populates these illustrations, portraying traditional costumes, religious customs, and daily tasks in detail. The plates titled The Golden Tower, Seville and The Bridge, Ronda present scenes where ‘the same spice of the romantic hangs about the journey as when Washington Irving travelled by a somewhat similar road. You pass the same picturesque beggars en route’ (54). Judging by illustrations such as the Gate of the Mosque in the Alhambra, The Generalife, from the Walls of the Alhambra, and Murcia, Griffiths appears to follow the American traveller’s itinerary closely.27 And, of course, the bullring stands out as a privileged space to appreciate the quintessence of Spanish picturesqueness: Of all others [ceremonies], the bull-fights are most sanguinary and successful. The city, always full, is crowded now to excess; country-folk in their picturesque garb, showing that the well-known majo dress of Andalusia is not yet extinct, mix with the blue-blooded hidalgos, or sons of somebody [...] Gigantic paper fans of gorgeous hues repeat the masses of bright colour, and the effect of the whole is that of a vast flower-bed filled with choice exotics, all instinct with life. In Seville, moreover, the present construction of the ring adds wonderfully to its picturesqueness.28

Needless to say, Córdoba’s Moorish architecture, ‘the capital of this powerful and independent caliphate, the successful rival of Damascus and Bagdad’, and Granada, ‘the last home and stronghold of the Moors in Spain’, remains the most recurrent picturesque element for its capacity to evoke other

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Grifiths, ‘Gibraltar and Ronda,’ p. 46. See Gilpin, Essay III. Gilpin, p. 14. For a discussion of Washington Irving’s travels in Spain, see Jeffrey Scraba, ‘“Dear Old Romantic Spain”: Washington Irving Imagines Andalucía’ in this collection. Editor’s note. ‘A Ticket in the Shade-Seville Bull-Ring,’ in Griffiths, ‘Spain. New Castile and Estremadura’, pp. 222, 226.

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Figure 3. ‘La Torre de las Infantas’, from Picturesque Europe, vol 5 (c. 1870)

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cultures, exotic civilisations and past, legendary times.29 The Mezquita of Córdoba (Bridge and Mosque of Cordova) and the Alhambra of Granada take on special significance. Among the images belonging to the Alhambra, an emblem of ‘ornate picturesqueness’, and of the Generalife (The Alhambra, Entrance to the Hall of Ambassadors, The Vermilion Towers) — which very much resemble those painted at the beginning of the century by David Roberts — the illustration Torre de las Infantas stands out, in which a lady raises her gaze from the book she is reading, maybe by Washington Irving, and, quite absorbed, appears to be recalling the splendour of the surrounding walls that now are ruins.30 The chapter devoted to the Centre (New Castille and Estremadura), also written by Arthur Griffiths, includes a steel engraving of the leaning tower in Zaragoza (The Leaning Tower, Saragossa) designed by Ernest George and engraved by Thomas Heawood, and another ten illustrations by Harry Fenn engraved on wood by Whymper. These illustrations offer a visual tour of travel in Alcántara (Cáceres) and its Roman bridge, Badajoz, Madrid and the Royal Palace, Toledo (from different points of view), Cuenca, Alarcón, and La Roda. Due to its memorable history, its ruins, its dilapidated walls and crumbling palaces, as well as the succession of cultures which have inhabited this city, Toledo is once more the main focus. Griffiths is especially interested in Moorish architecture (Puerta del Sol, Toledo), and this very same interest leads him to Alarcón and Cuenca, on whose view he remarks: ‘The weird picturesqueness of the scene is greatly heightened by the very curious shapes into which atmospheric action has worn the pointed rocks’.31 The North of Spain is only mentioned in one chapter in the third volume of Picturesque Europe: ‘The North and Old Castile’, along with impeccable illustrations by Harry Fenn and Richard Principal Leitch, engraved on steel by John Godfrey and on wood by Whymper and Harley.32 Once more, the emphasis is put not only on the variety of the different Spanish characters walking up and down streets and squares or leaning out of a balcony, but also on the contrasts between popular constructions and the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, ruins from antiquity, or on the dialogue with nature in visual vignettes of places such as the Plaza de la Constitución, Vittoria; Market 29 30 31 32

Ibid., pp. 176, 215. Griffiths, ‘Granada’, p. 179. Griffiths, ‘Spain. New Castile and Estremadura’, p. 106. The volume also includes chapters on Normandy and Brittany, The Italian Lakes, The Passes of the Alps, The Cornice Road, The Forest of Fontainebleau, The Rhine, Venice, The Pyrenees (focusing on the French side and not the Spanish one), Rome and its Environs, The Bernese Oberland, and The Rhine (from Boppart to the Drachenfels).

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Figure 4. ‘River at Segovia, and Alcazar’, from Picturesque Europe, vol 4 (c. 1870) Place, Valladolid; the Puerta de Santa Maria, Burgos, and The Bridge of Salamanca; described as ‘smart and picturesque’.33 The Pass of Pancorbo, a classic par excellence in picturesque travel writings and declared by Davillier as ‘one of the wildest and most picturesque places in Spain and in the world’ is also present.34 Another purpose of the sketch is to illustrate Griffiths’ yearning for a lost picturesque: ‘the traveller entering Spain now-a-days, in a snug railway-carriage, gains speed and comfort at the expense of much picturesqueness and local colour’.35 Griffiths reads Spain’s roughness as one of the principal characteristics of its picturesqueness, but sees it as endangered by progress and scientific developments.

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Griffiths, Arthur, ‘The North and Old Castile’, p. 274. Gustave Doré and Charles Davillier, Viaje por España, 2 vols (Madrid: Grech, 1988), II, pp. 375-378. See also Theophile Gautier, A Romantic in Spain (Signal Books, 2001; repr. 1845), p. 29. Griffiths (1870e), p. 271.

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Figure 5. ‘Lemonade-seller, Madrid,’ from The World, its Cities and Peoples (c.1890) Picturesque travel through Spain became a growing literary genre for the English public during the nineteenth century, and many titles could be mentioned as examples. In this respect, Cassell & Company went on editing similar works to the ones referred to earlier, although in a cheaper and smaller format (large 8vo); one of the most remarkable publications is The World, its Cities and Peoples, an interesting anthropological survey of the main European groups (Italic, French, Spanish, Romanian, Swiss, Slavic, Hellenic and Germanic). Once more, illustrations stress the picturesqueness of those countries by highlighting their regional dresses, customs, and way of

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life. Regarding the Spanish people, the text offers many clichés sustained even today: the Spanish are full of contradictions, solemn and grave, passionate and fanatic, magnanimous, fatalist, not very fond of reading, and very fond of bullfighting. The illustrations, at the same time, reinforce the variety and picturesque composition of the popular classes, identifying regions with trades: wandering tailors of Barcelona, water-carriers of Toledo, innkeepers from La Mancha, milkmen of Salamanca, lemonade-sellers of Madrid, and peasants of Alcoy. Some of these illustrations, drawn by Gustave Doré, were well-known since they had first appeared in Charles Davillier’s Le Tour du Monde. Voyage en Espagne (Paris: Hachette, 186273).36 Archetypical representations of the Romantic image of Spain, as seen by the French, were conveyed to the English imagination thanks to works such as the ones provided by Cassell & Co. Before the nineteenth century came to an end, one last destination remained unexplored by English travellers in search of the picturesque. Overexposure and the progress of industrialization began to exhaust the North and South of Spain as picturesque destinations, so travellers found it necessary to journey to a region otherwise considered an unremarkable stop in the traditional tour of Spain. La Mancha was suddenly regarded as more authentic, popular, rustic, and even untamed than the usual destinations. The enduring appeal of Cervantes’ immortal novel, The History of the Valorous and Witty Knighterrant Don Quixote of the Mancha for the English public renewed an interest in that central region of Spain. Let us remember that the first critical edition of Don Quixote appeared in England (London: Tonson, 1738) and that a critical edition appeared in Spain only in 1780 (Madrid: Ibarra/Spanish Royal Academy); nevertheless, the illustrations belonging to the English edition, as well as later ones, are English settings, making clear that La Mancha, as a real geographical space, was very much unknown.37 In some ways, the French anticipated the English rediscovery of La Mancha as a romantic and picturesque destination and also a literary journey on the trail of Don Quixote. The journey of Davillier and Doré has already 36

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Charles Davillier (1823-1883) and Paul Gustave Doré (1832-1883) — the former a great Hispanist devoted to the study of the Spanish culture and author of many works on Spanish antiquities, and the latter one of the most prolific painters, engravers and illustrators of the nineteenth century — journeyed through Spain during 1861 and 1862, whose result was the already mentioned travel book and more than 250 illustrations. Both text and illustrations constitute a valuable whole where thorough descriptions are provided about different means of transport, phases of a bullfight, the art of the jack-knife, the duels, executions, religious ceremonies, gastronomy, costumes, monuments and landscape. Illustrations by William Kent, John Vanderbank and William Hogarth.

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been mentioned; its main purpose was to allow Doré to take from life the necessary sketches for his illustrations of Don Quixote in 1863 (Paris: Hachette). It is also worth noting that the illustrator Berthold Mahn also travelled throughout La Mancha in order to draw illustrations for a new edition of Don Quixote (Paris: Union Latine d’Editions, 1935); nevertheless, no travel book was published and only the illustrations account for the journey. We can certainly ascribe the first monographic travel to La Mancha to an English editor, T. Fisher Unwin; Doré’s journey had been throughout all Spain. In 1895, Unwin asked Daniel Urrabieta Vierge to illustrate a new English edition of Don Quixote, suggesting that he should travel to La Mancha to see first hand the necessary material, since ‘it is incredible how few changes have taken place in the home of the hero since the days of his wanderings. The customs, the character, the manner of dress, and the speech of its inhabitants, have remained practically unchanged’.38 The edition of Don Quixote illustrated by Vierge contained illustrations referred to as the ‘crowning achievement of Vierge’s career’ (Jaccaci, p. ix); it did not appear until 1906-07, and was published in London by Unwin and in New York by Scribner’s Sons (it was published posthumously after Vierge’s death in 1904).39 Nevertheless, 130 of Vierge’s drawings about La Mancha had come out earlier to illustrate August F. Jaccaci’s travel book, On the Trail of Don Quixote: Being a record of Rambles in the Ancient Province of La Mancha (New York: Scribner’s Son, 1896 / London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897).40 Throughout both the narrative and the illustrations, the reader can discover the extent to which Cervantes’ work had become a guidebook to the landscape of La Mancha with picturesque eyes. For Jacacci, Vierge’s

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August F. Jaccaci, On the Trail of Don Quixote (New York: Ch. Scribner’s sons, 1896), p. x. All the illustrations referred to in editions of Don Quixote can be seen in ‘Iconografía Textual del Quijote’, in the Cervantes Project, ed. by Eduardo Urbina [accessed 10 June 2009]. For further information about these Projects, see Fernando González et al.: ‘La colección de Quijotes ilustrados del Proyecto Cervantes: catálogo de ediciones y archivo digital de imágenes’, in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 25.1 (2005) 79-104; Eduardo Urbina et al., ‘Visual Knowledge: Textual Iconography of the Quixote’, in Don Quixote Illustrated: Textual Images and Visual Readings, ed. by E. Urbina and J. G. Maestro (Pontevedra: Mirabel Editorial, 2005), pp. 1538; and Eduardo Urbina et al., ‘Textual Iconography of the Quixote: A Data Model for Extending the Single-Faceted Pictorial Space into a Poly-Faceted Semantic Web’, in Digital Humanities 2006 Conference Abstracts, Association for Digital Humanities Organization International Conference (Paris: Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006), pp. 215-220. Jacacci is the author of the book that narrates Vierge’s experience throughout La Mancha.

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residence during his stay in Argamasilla, the Parador del Carmen, becomes ‘the most picturesque place imaginable’ because it resembles those inns Don Quixote used to take for castles. (p. 18) The landscape surrounded by ruins where the adventure of the fulling-hammers took place is described as a ‘picturesque scenery’ (p. 66); the ravines of Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote does his desperate love penance, stand out because of ‘all their wealth of picturesque and rugged beauty’ (p. 208); and, in general, all the roads by which the knight and his squire wander are full of ‘decrepit buildings, half-ruined villages, ragged mendicants […] having variety in its picturesqueness and dignity in many of its buildings’. (pp. 137, 149) The ruins that mark the landscape are also stressed as an evocative element, just as many passages in Don Quixote take us away from the present to faraway lands (Florence, Tangiers). For Jaccaci and Vierge, the journey throughout La Mancha becomes an excuse to recall a feudal, medieval past — for example, the view of the Castle of Montiel (p. 98); a pretext to corroborate the survival of the Moorish culture in certain habits and customs of its inhabitants (p. 110); or even to perceive the atmosphere of North Africa and the Sahara. (p. 118) Bearing all that in mind, the hardships of the journey are not important, since they are ‘more than compensated for by constant intercourse with plain, old-time folks, by the superb scenery, with its ruined castles and caravansaries, relics of feudal and Moorish days, by the ancient customs and the legends which, like ivy on a gnarled oak-tree, cling to every

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bit of this historical and romantic land’. (p. 63) The Manchego himself becomes a constant evocation of that past land and seem to be surrounded by a legendary aura. His character, described as ‘shy, taciturn, and sombre’, and of ‘picturesque humanity’ is presented, as in earlier travel books, as an epitome of the Spanish character in general. (pp. 96-103) Literature, the past, history, legend, and nature were interwoven in La Mancha in such a way that it was the perfect destination for the painter-writer traveller in search of the picturesque: ‘The writer felt, more profoundly than he could express in words, how, in such a community, the remnants and voices of the past form an essential part of the living present. He wished above all that he could have made his rambling notes ring with more of his keen delight and appreciation of active, open-air life in a rarely varied and picturesque region happily as yet despised by the tourist’. (Jaccaci, p. x) For travellers, La Mancha beckoned as the last romantic and picturesque destination while the beginning of the twentieth century adumbrated the developments of modern life.

Bibliography Andrews, Malcom, The Search for the Picturesque (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1989) Borrow, George, The Bible in Spain; or, the Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (London: John Murray, 1899; repr. 1843) Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel, L´ingénieux hidalgo don Quichotte de la Manche (Paris: Librairie L. Hachette et Cie., 1863) ——, The History of the Valorous and Witty Knight-errant Don Quixote of the Mancha (London: T. Fisher Unwin / New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1906-7) ——, Don Quichotte de la Manche (Paris: Union Latine d’Editions, 1935) Combe, William, Doctor Syntax’s Three Tours in Search of the Picturesque, of Consolation, and of a Wife (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895) Doré, Gustave, and Charles Davillier, Viaje por España, 2 vols (Madrid: Grech, 1988) Galán, Eva, and others, La Imagen Romántica del Legado Andalusí (Barcelona/Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 1995)

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Gautier, Theophile, A Romantic in Spain, trans by. Catherine Alison Phillips (Oxford: Signal Books, 2001) Gilpin, William, Five Essays on Picturesque Subjects (London: Cadell and Davies, 1808) González Moreno, Fernando, et al., ‘La colección de Quijotes ilustrados del Proyecto Cervantes: catálogo de ediciones y archivo digital de imágenes’, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 25.1 (2005), 79-104. González Moreno, Beatriz, Lo sublime, lo gótico y lo romántico: la experiencia estética en el romanticismo inglés (Cuenca: Servicio Publicaciones UCLM, 2007) Griffiths, Arthur, ‘Gibraltar and Ronda’, in Picturesque Europe, 5 vols (London: Cassell, Peter and Galpin, c.1870), V, pp. 39-55. ——, ‘Granada and the East Coast of Spain’, V, pp. 176-191. ——, ‘Spain: Cordova, Seville and Cadiz’, IV, pp. 215-230. ——, ‘Spain. New Castile and Estremadura’, IV, pp. 96-111. ——, ‘The North and Old Castile’, III, pp. 268-288. ——, Fifty Years of Public Service (London, Paris, New York: Cassell and Company, 1904) Jaccaci, August F., On the Trail of Don Quixote (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896) Kant, Immanuel, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (London: University of California Press, 1991) Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) Price, Uvedale, ‘An Essay on the picturesque, as compared with the sublime and beautiful’, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed by. A. Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 271-275. The World, its Cities and Peoples (London, Paris, New York, Melbourne: Cassell & Company, c.1890) Trott, Nicola, ‘The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) Urbina Eduardo, et al., ‘Visual Knowledge: Textual Iconography of the Quixote’, in Don Quixote Illustrated: Textual Images and Visual Readings, ed. by E. Urbina and J. G. Maestro (Pontevedra: Mirabel Editorial, 2005), pp. 15-38. Villar Garrido, Ángel, and Jesús Villar Garrido, Viajeros por la Historia. Extranjeros en Castilla-La Mancha (Toledo: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, 1997)

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Fernando González Moreno DQG Beatriz González Moreno

Wells, Nathaniel Armstrong, The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain […] with Illustrations representing Moorish Palaces, Cathedrals, and other Monuments of Art (London: Richard Bentley, 1846)

Notes on Contributors Joselyn M. Almeida is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work examines the cultural and material exchanges between Britain and the non-Anglophone Americas. Recent publications include ‘“Perfectly Compatible Objects”: Mr. Pitt Contemplates Britain and South America’, in Romanticism and the Object, ed. by Larry Peer (Forthcoming 2009); ‘José Blanco White and the Making of AngloHispanic Romanticism’, European Romantic Review (2006), and ‘Conquest and Slavery in Robert Southey’s Madoc and James Montgomery’s The West Indies’, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. by Lynda Pratt (2006). She is currently at work on a book entitled Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890 (forthcoming, Ashgate). M. Soledad Caballero is Assistant Professor of English at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania. Her recent publications include ‘“For the Honour of Our Country:” Maria Dundas Graham and the Romance of Benign Domination’ in Studies in Travel Writing, and ‘Gothic Routes: Travel Writing and Anthropology in Frances Calderón de La Barca’s Life in Mexico,’ in The Gothic Other (2004), ed. by Ruth Anolik and Douglas L. Howard. She is currently co-editing Maria Graham’s Journal of a voyage to Brazil with Jennifer Hayward (forthcoming, Parlor Press). Jeffrey Cass is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. He is co-editor with Larry Peer of Romantic Border Crossings (2008), and Interrogating Orientalism: Theoretical Approaches and Contextual Practices (2006), with Diane Hoeveler. He has also edited and provided commentary for a new edition of Karh Kahlert’s The Necromancer (Valancourt Books 2007). In addition, he has published articles on Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Felicia Hemans, and Philip Meadows Taylor in journals such as ANQ, Papers on Language and Literature, Dickens Studies Annual, European Romantic Review, and South Asian Review. Jessica Damián is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College, where she teaches composition and transatlantic literature. Her current book project, Mining Romanticism: British Women Writers and South America, 1770-1860, examines the role which mining played in the construction of the British Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth

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century. Damián’s most recent work, ‘Mary Seacole’s Ambitious Adventures in the New Granada Gold Mining Company,’ was published in the Journal of West Indian Literature (October 2007), and her article, ‘Helen Maria Williams’s Personal Narrative of Travels from Peru to Peruvian Tales,’ was published in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (Summer 2007). Jessica serves on the Editorial Board of Anthurium: A Caribbean Literary Studies Journal and the Review Board for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami at Coral Gables. Cristina Flores is Associate Professor of English Literature and Language at the Department of Modern Philology at the University of la Rioja (Spain). Her main research interests include Romantic literary theory and poetry, especially S. T. Coleridge’s poetics. Her book Plastic Intellectual Breeze: the Contribution of Ralph Cudworth to S. T. Coleridge’s Early Poetics of the Symbol (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008) has recently been published. She is currently working on the reception of British Romantic authors in Spanish Literature and, as a result, two articles on the connection Coleridge– Unamuno are forthcoming (Comparative Critical Studies, University of Edinburgh Press; and Journal of English Studies, University of La Rioja Press). Beatriz González Moreno is Associate Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, where she teaches English Literature. She is the author of Frankenstein: Lo sublime, lo gótico y lo romántico: la experiencia estética en el romanticismo inglés (2007). Recent publications include: ‘Gothic Excess And Aesthetic Ambiguity In Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya,’ in the Women’s Writing special volume on Transgressive Women, ed. by Harriet Devine Jump, and ‘The Reception of Shelley in Spain’ with Santiago Rodríguez in The Reception of P. B. Shelley in Europe, ed. by Susanne Schmid and Michael Rossington. She has also translated into Spanish and edited Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist. Fernando González Moreno is Associate Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, where he teaches History of Art. He has been a visiting Research Scholar in the Cervantes Project at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. He is author of El Quijote de la Luces. Ilustraciones para la edición de la Imprenta Real, 1797-1798 (2004), and has collaborated on the organization of two exhibitions: Iconografía popular de el Quijote

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(2005) and La cerámica española y Don Quijote (2005); he co-authored the catalogues for both of these exhibitions. His first book, Decadencia y revival en la azulejería talaverana: retablos, altares y paneles del “Renacimiento” Ruiz de Luna (Decadence and revival in Talavera tiles: altarpieces, altar frontals and panels in Ruiz de Luna’s “Renaissance”) was published in 2002. Tim Fulford is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Coleridge’s Figurative Language (1991) and Landscape, Liberty and Authority (1996). He edited, with Morton D. Paley, Coleridge’s Visionary Languages (1993), and has published many articles on Romantic writers. His textual editions and co-authored collections include Travel, Explorations, and Empires, 1770-1835, 8 vols (2001-2002) and Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire 1780-1830 (1998), both co-edited with Peter Kitson. Professor Fulford has also written a critical study of representations of and also writings by Native Americans during the Romantic era, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756-1830 (2006). Jennifer Hayward is Professor and Chair of English at The College of Wooster, Ohio. She is editor of a new critical edition of Maria Graham's Journal of a residence in Chile (University Press of Virgina, 2003) and, with Soledad Caballero, of a forthcoming edition of Graham’s Journal of a voyage to Brazil (Parlor Press). In addition, she is the author of Consuming Fictions: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soaps (1998) and numerous articles. Her current work on British travelers in Latin America focuses on questions of genre, gender, and national identity. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz is Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College. She is the author of several articles on British Romantic treatments of Spanish America, most recently ‘Lord Byron’s “South American Project”: Aristocratic Radicalism and The Question of Venezuelan Settlement’, (Keats-Shelley Journal, forthcoming); ‘“Thy World Columbus Shall Be Free”: British Romantic Deviance and Spanish American Revolution’ (European Romantic Review, April 2006), and ‘The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism’ (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Nov. 2006). Her monograph, Spanish America and British Romanticism: Rewriting Conquest is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.

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Alicia Laspra Rodríguez is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics, and also in Transcription and Translation into Spanish of nineteenth century English and French historical documents, at the Universidad de Oviedo, Spain. She is the author of Intervencionismo y Revolución: Asturias y Gran Bretaña durante la Guerra de la Independencia 1808-1813 (1992), La intervención británica en Asturias durante la Guerra de la Independencia: estudio histórico y repertorio documental (1999), and several articles on Anglo-Spanish Relations. She has also published a book and several articles on Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. Her latest book, La Guerra de la Independencia en los archivos del War Office. Colección documental. Vol. I (1808-1809) will be published by the Spanish Ministerio de Defensa in 2009. She is currently working on the edition of the Oviedo Gazette (1808-1809), and on a joint project with Limerick Civic Trust (Ireland) about Sir William Parker Carrol’s biography. M. Eugenia Perojo Arronte is Professor of English at the University of Valladolid, Spain. Her main fields of research have been British Romanticism and literary theory, and their reception in Spain. She is the director of the Research Project ‘La recepción de la literatura inglesa en España en los siglos XVIII y XIX’ (‘The Reception of British literature in Spain during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’), funded by the Junta de Castilla y León for the years 2004-2006. The project has been renewed under the title ‘Recepción literaria y renovación poética: la literatura británica en España en los siglos XIX y XX’ (‘Literary Reception and Poetic Renovation: British Literature in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Spain’). Her publications include S.T. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’ y el reto de la poesía (Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Científico, 1998); Sir Phillip Sydney: Defensa de la poesía, ed. and trans. Berta Cano Echevarría, Mª Eugenia Perojo Arronte y Ana Sáez Hidalgo (Maid: Cátea, 2003), and numerous articles on Coleridge, his poetics, and his reception history in Britain and Spain. Diego Saglia is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Parma, Italy. He is the author of Byron and Spain: Itinerary in the Place of Writing (1996) and Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000). He has co-edited several collections, including Re-Drawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland, with Beatrice Battaglia (2004); British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting, with Laura Bandiera (2005), and Il teatro della paura: scenari gotici del romanticismo europeo, with Giovana Silvani (2005).

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Saglia’s digital editions of Sophia Lee’s Almeyda, Queen of Granada (2005) and Matthew Lewis’ The Castle Spectre (2003) have made these texts widely available. His numerous articles on British Romanticism and Spain have appared in ELH, Comparative Literature Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in Romanticism, and The Keats-Shelley Journal, among others. Jeffrey Scraba is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis, Tennessee. He has published articles on Walter Scott and on Washington Irving, and he is currently working on a book-length project entitled Storied Places: Tourism, Nostalgia, and the Production of the Local. Nanora Sweet has co-edited Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. She has contributed studies of Hemans’s work and context to Prose Studies, European Romantic Review, At the Limits of Romanticism, and other journals and collections, most recently on laureate triumph for Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies. She has authored Hemans’s life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Nan teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Susan Valladares is a doctoral candidate at Oriel College, University of Oxford. She is writing her thesis on British Romanticism and representations of Spain, and is particularly interested in the intersection between political culture and the Georgian stage.

Index

Ackermann, Rudolph (Rudolf) 39, 40, 56, 57–58, 188, 190 Adams, John 59 aesthetics: and Blanco White 165–66 and Frances Calderón 21, 305, 306 and Irving 279 and the picturesque 22, 341 and travel writing 342 Agamben, Giorgio 242 Agg, John 15–16, 117, 121 and Asturias 109 The Book Itself 113 The Dawn of Liberty on the Continent of Europe 15, 113–16, 127, 128 Edwy and Elgiva 113 History of Congress 113–14 and Hughes 127 Lord Byron’s Farewell to England 113 Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage to the Holy Land 113 The Ocean Harp 113 The Royal Sufferer 113 Aguirre, Robert 13n12, 54n4, 77, 188n22, 207n86, 209 Alcalá Galiano, Antonio 17, 18, 22, 213–30 article on Macaulay’s History of England 227 articles in The Athenaeum 18, 214, 216, 219, 223, 224–25, 226, 228–29 articles in The Foreign Quarterly Review 214 articles in The Westminster Review 214 career of 214 and Crónica de ambos mundos 227 ‘De la influencia de Lord Byron en la literatura contemporánea’ 227 El estudio profundo y detenido de las lenguas extranjeras 227 Historia de España 34–35 Historia de la literatura española, francesa, inglesa e italiana 219, 224–25, 228, 229

‘Introductory lecture delivered in the University of London’ 18, 216– 24 Lecciones de derecho político 229 Memorias de un anciano 215 ‘Preface’ to Saavedra’s El moro expósito 214, 224, 225, 228 ‘Reflexiones sobre la influencia del espíritu caballeresco de la Edad Media en la civilización europea’ 222 Alcalá Galiano, Vicente 223 Alfonso X 218 Siete Partidas 219 Alhambra 275–80, 281, 283, 284, 290, 291, 292, 352 alien/alienation: and Frances Calderón 305, 306, 307, 309 and Hemans 160, 171, 239 and Lee 239 and Southey 144 Allen, John 43 Almeida, Joselyn M. 167 Alvarez, José 93, 94 Álvarez-Cerelluelo, Pedro 126 Amador de los Ríos, José 38 Anderson, Benedict 53, 56–57, 299, 300 Andrés, Juan, Dell’Origene, Progressi e statto attuale d’ogni letteratura 217, 218 Anglo-Irish Union 144 Antepara, José María 67 Antonio de Nebrija, Luis Vives 220 Arabs, language and culture of 217, 218, 219, 221, 289 Arana, Vicente de 252 Argensola, Bartolomé 219, 220 Argensola, Lupercio 219, 220 Argentina 94, 99 Argüelles, Agustín de 39 Argüelles Toral, Juan 114, 115 Arjona, Manuel María de 36–37

368

Index

Asturias 15, 111, 112–13, 114–16, 121, 124–28 Athenaeum, The 224 audience/readers: and Adam Smith 16 and Blanco White 71, 72–73 and Coleridge 140, 142 and Cowley 235, 237 and Frances Calderón 302, 309, 314, 316, 319–23 and Graham 321–22, 327 of Irving 275, 277, 278, 279, 282, 284, 285, 287–88, 289 and politics 239 of travel writing 299 auto de fé 162, 169, 170, 172, 173, 179. see also Inquisition Aztecs 183, 316 Baillie, Joanna 237, 246, 276 A Series of Plays 137 Bainbridge, Simon 9–10 Barbauld, Anna, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven 9, 110, 118 Baretti, Giuseppe 29 Journey from London to Genoa 30 Baucom, Ian 6, 63 beauty 342, 343, 345 Bello, Andrés 17, 22, 56, 60, 77, 166, 185 Biblioteca Americana 18 Repertorio Americano 18 “Silvas Americanas” 58 Bentham, Jeremy 11, 18, 33, 45, 56, 59, 70, 166, 215 Bettinelli, Saverio, Del risorgimento d’Italia negli Studii. Nelle Arti e nei costumi dopo il Mille 218 Bewell, Alan 199 Bhabha, Homi K. 159, 160n3, 234, 300, 312, 324 Bible 170, 172, 175, 177 Biblioteca Americana 58 Blackwood, William 169 Blair, Hugh 225 Blair, Robert, The Grave 58 Blake, William 58, 249, 250 ‘London’ 267 Songs of Innocence and Experience 267–68

Blanco White, José María 13, 17 and Alcalá Galiano 18, 219, 224 ‘The Alcazar of Seville’ 176–77 and Bello and Miranda 60 and British Romanticism 213 and Capmany 43 Cartas de Inglaterra 60 and El Español 14, 53, 56, 71, 72, 73 exile of 160 ‘Extractos de las Gacetas Americanas’ 71 family background of 165 and Hemans 16, 117, 159–79 Letters from Spain 160, 164, 165–66, 174, 189n24 as mediator 22, 71–77 and religion 161, 171 ‘Tale of the Green Taper’ 176, 177 and Variedades 18, 57–58 Boabdil 293–94 body: and Cowley 236, 237 and cross-cultural conflict 239, 240, 241, 242, 246 and Frances Calderón 318–19 and Hemans 243, 245 and marriage 235, 236 Bolívar, Juan Vicente 59 Bolívar, Simón 17, 22, 59, 60–61, 73, 76, 94, 98–99, 185, 187 Carta de Jamaica 72 Bonaparte, Joseph 42, 67, 68, 86 Book of the Conde Lucanor (Juan Manuel, Infante of Castille) 219 Borrow, George: The Bible in Spain 22, 341, 345, 346 The Zincali 22, 345 Boswell, James 138 Bourbon dynasty 223, 228 Bouterwek, Friedrich 218, 221 Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit 35–36, 217 Bowring, Sir John 32 Braham, John 84 Brazil 15, 81, 82, 102–3 British (term) 310 Britishness 92, 311–13. see also Englishness

Index

Brougham, Henry 56 Browne, Felicia Dorothea. see Hemans, Felicia Browne, George 117, 164 Browne, Thomas Henry 117, 161, 164 Bullock, William 183, 188, 190, 207–8 Burdett, Sir Francis 92 Burke, Edmund 75, 164 Reflections on the Revolution in France 9 Burke, William 185 Burns, Robert 250 Burrard, Sir Harry 89 Bustamante, Anastasio 323 Byron, Lord 9, 10, 15, 81 The Age of Bronze 105, 205n84 and Agg 113 and Asturias 109 and Blanco White 165 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 90, 110, 123–24 Don Juan 54 and Graham 100 and Greek independence 105–6 and Hemans 117, 168 and Hughes 125 and Knight 121 The Siege of Corinth 40 and Spanish American independence 22 and Unamuno 249, 250, 256, 264 Cadalso, José 228 Caimo, Norberto, Lettere d’un vago italiano ad un suo amico 29 Cajigal, Juan Manuel de 59 Calderón de la Barca, Ángel 20, 301–2, 313, 321–22, 323 Calderón de la Barca, Frances 22 and aesthetics 21, 305, 306 and alien/alienation 305, 306, 307, 309 and audience/readers 302, 309, 314, 316, 319–23 and culture 298, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318–19, 320, 321, 322 and empire/imperialism 21, 305, 310, 311, 312, 313, 317, 319, 322

369

and Europe/Europeans 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 308, 309, 312, 313–14, 318, 319, 320, 323 and gender 20, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 306, 312, 313, 316, 319, 320, 322 and history 313, 316 and identity 20–21, 298, 300, 301, 302, 305, 310, 311, 313–16, 318, 319–20 letter to Prescott 313 Life in Mexico 20, 297–324 and marriage 300, 313, 314, 315, 316, 319, 319–20 and melancholy 20–21, 298, 303–7, 319 and modernity 302, 305, 309, 311, 313, 314, 322, 323 and national identity 310, 311, 313, 314–15, 316, 319–20, 322, 323 and nationalism 297, 299, 305, 308, 309, 312, 318–19 and nostalgia 307, 309, 310, 311, 314, 318, 323 and Other 300, 301, 312, 317, 322 and past 304, 305, 308, 316, 323 and subject position 300, 305, 307, 309, 313, 323 and travel literature 21, 297, 298, 301, 302, 304, 317, 321, 341 and women 306, 312, 317, 319 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 215, 222 Calero, Marcelino 39 Campbell, Thomas 161, 162, 170, 177 Campomanes, Manuel Cortés 67 Canning, George 15, 27, 45, 112, 116, 122, 126, 184, 187 Cantar de mio Cid 36 Capmany, Antonio de: Elocuencia española 38 Filosofía de la elocuencia 42–43 Carlyle, Thomas 250 Caro, Pedro 59, 61 Carrandi, José 126 Casiri, Miguel, Biblioteca ArabicoHispanica Escurialensis 221 Cassell, Peter & Galpin: Picturesque Europe 344, 347–53

370

Index

The Alhambra, 352 The Bridge of Salamanca, 344, 353 Burgos, 353 Entrance to the Hall of Ambassadors, 352 Gibraltar, from Gaucin, 349 The Leaning Tower, Saragossa, 352 Market Place, 352–53 The Pass of Pancorbo, 353 Plaza de la Constitución, 352 Puerta del Sol, Toledo, 352 Puerta de Santa Maria, 353 River at Segovia, and Alcazar, 353 La Torre de las Infantas, 351 Valladolid, 353 The Vermilion Towers, 352 Cassell & Company, The World, its Cities and Peoples 354–55 Lemonade-seller, Madrid 354 Castlereagh, Lord 112, 184 Catholic Emancipation 161 Catholicism: and Blanco White 16, 166, 167, 171 and Coleridge 144–45, 148 and Faber 215 and Frances Calderón 298, 313, 319 and Hemans 16, 163, 164, 170, 174, 179, 192 and Irving 286, 288, 289 see also religion Centlivre, Susanna, The Busybody 26, 27 Cernuda, Luis 269 Cervantes, Miguel de 219, 222 Don Quixote 20, 27–28, 29, 275, 282–83, 284, 285, 287, 289, 290, 341, 355, 356, 357 Numancia 41 Chanlaire, P. G., and Mentelle, E. 31 Channing, William Ellery 162 Chile: and Graham 21, 327–39 independence of 338–39 and T. Cochrane 15, 81, 82, 93–98, 99, 103, 104, 107, 201 and trade 204

chronicles 194, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290 Chronological Abridgment of the History of Spain 34 Churton, Edward, Gongora 43 Cid, El 10, 120, 219, 243, 244 Cid, El (poem) 36, 218 civilization 304, 306, 309, 312, 317, 320 classicism 214–15, 219, 225, 226–27, 228 Clavijero, Francisco 12 Historia Antigua de México 60 Cochrane, Katherine Barnes 15, 95, 99– 102, 106 Cochrane, Thomas 14–15, 21, 81–107, 333, 335, 339 Autobiography of a Seaman 89, 95 and Brazil 102–3 career of 83–85 and Chile 103 and The Contrast of kings! Charles the French Tyrant 106 and corruption 90–91 and Greek independence 105–6 Narrative 100, 101 and parliament 91, 92, 93 and Peninsular War 87 and South America 93–105, 106–7 and Stock Exchange 92–93, 106 Cochrane, Tom (son) 95 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9, 60, 89–90 and Alcalá Galiano 227 Biographia Literaria 135 and Blanco White 166 ‘Dejection’ 263 Fears in Solitude 110 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 169 and Hemans 159, 164–65, 169, 170, 172 letter to Thelwall 150 letter to William Bowles 147 Lyrical Ballads 251, 255, 260 Notebook of 1796 136 Osorio 16, 133, 134, 136, 139–40, 143, 144–45, 146–48, 149, 151– 52, 166, 233 and Peninsular War 16 ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ 254

Index

Remorse 16, 133–34, 135–36, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145–49, 151–52, 159, 165, 166, 170, 172, 233 and Spanish American independence 22 ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ 257 and Unamuno 19, 249, 250, 251–52, 254, 256, 257, 260, 261, 263, 269 and Walton 262 Colley, Linda 141, 144, 311 Colman, George, Inkle and Yarico 143 Colombia 200 Colombiano, El 53, 56, 67, 71, 72 colonialism 17, 45, 53 and Blanco White 14 and British identity 312 and Frances Calderón 322 in Hemans 191–92 in Southey 195 and trade 204 see also under Spain Combe, William, The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque: A Poem 341 commerce 57, 204 and Coleridge 142, 143, 144 and Frances Calderón 307, 308 and Hemans 183 and South America 83, 103–4 and Southey 183 and Spanish America 203 and Spanish imperialism 143 see also Great Britain, investments in Spanish America Conde, José Antonio 37 Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España 35, 38 Congress of Vienna 233 Convention of Cintra 15, 89–90, 118, 134, 233 Cortez, Hernán 9, 11, 105, 192, 207, 305 Courts of Cadiz 233 Covadunga (Lady of the Cave) 15, 123, 125, 126 Covent Garden 139, 183, 187

371

Cowley, Hannah, A Bold Stroke for a Husband 19, 27, 234, 235–38, 239, 246 Cowper, William 229 Coxe, William, Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon 34 Croker, John Wilson, The Battle of Talavera 110 Crusades 288, 289 Cuauhtémoc (Guatimozin) 11 Cugoano, Ottobah, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species 12 culture 57 and Borrow 346 and colonization 33, 46 English 309, 310, 312 export of British 22 and Frances Calderón 298, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318–19, 320, 321, 322 and Graham 321–22 and imperialism 46 Moorish 357 national 312 and the picturesque 22 print 299 of Spain 31 translation of 35 and Wells 347 Dalrymple, Sir Hew 89 Darwin, Charles 21 Davillier, Charles 353, 355–56 Le Tour du Monde. Voyage en Espagne 355 Defoe, Daniel 250 déjà vu 162, 164, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179 de la Concha, Alonso 126 de la Vega, Andrés Ángel 111, 122 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal 207, 208 Dickens, Charles 250, 299, 315 Dilke, Charles W. 224 Dillon, John Talbot 32

372

Index

Dobrizhoffer, Martin, Historia de Abiponibus 189, 190n27, 195, 196, 198n58 Dolgorouki, Prince 278 Doré, Gustave 355–56 Dos de Mayo uprising 111, 134 Drake, Sir Francis 85, 97 Drekker, George 20 Drury Lane theatre 133, 138, 139, 140, 141–42 Dumouriez, Charles 55 Dundas, George 330, 333 Dunham, Samuel Astley, History of Spain and Portugal 34, 35 Durán, Agustín, Romancero 37 Dyer, Sir Thomas Richard 122 earthquakes 328, 329, 331, 334–35, 336, 338, 339 Eastlake, Lady 319–20 Edinburgh Review 59, 66 El Dorado 208 Elizabeth I 84, 144 Ellenborough, Lord 93 émigrés 14, 22, 39–40, 44, 53–77, 213. see also exile/exiles empire/imperialism 171 and Britain in Spanish American 298 British and Spanish 53–54, 205, 207, 208 and British debates over Spanish America 184 and Coleridge 133, 143, 144 and Cowley 236 and Frances Calderón 21, 305, 310, 311, 312, 313, 317, 319, 322 and Graham 328, 333 and Hemans 160, 163, 179, 193, 196 and Irving 290 and Lee 241 and Native Americans 203 in Planché 206 in Southey 196 and Spanish imaginary 235 and travel literature 299, 309 Englishness 311, 312, 319–20. see also Britishness; Great Britain Enlightenment 29, 222, 223

Epean, Sir Nevan 59 Español, El 71, 72, 73, 161, 167 Europe/Europeans 300 and Frances Calderón 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 308, 309, 312, 313–14, 318, 319, 320, 323 as modern 29 and nationalism 299 exile/exiles 56, 59–60, 64, 161, 162. see also émigrés Fabian, Johannes 311 Faist, Thomas 56, 57 Feijóo, Benito Jerónimo 223 Ferdinand II of Aragon 288 Ferdinand VII 16, 17, 69–70, 94, 114, 121, 213, 221, 224, 233 Fernández de León, Esteban 69 Flórez Estrada, Álvaro 114, 115, 120 Ford, Richard, A Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain 44, 341, 345–46 Forester, C. S. 106 Foucault, Michel 10, 11, 13, 167, 234 Fox, Charles James 61 France: and Alcalá Galiano 223 and Classicism 228 and Cochrane 85 and Grand Tour 342 invasion of Spain 53, 54 and Mill 66 and Miranda 68, 69 and neoclassicism 213, 214, 215, 228 and Romanticism 214, 227 Spanish uprising against 126 see also Napoleon French Revolution 70 Fulford, Tim 13 Galicia 112 Gayangos, Pascual de 37, 39 History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain 38 gaze 317, 318 gender 12, 19, 233–46 and Coleridge 133, 150–51

Index

and Frances Calderón 20, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 306, 312, 313, 316, 319, 320, 322 and Graham 337 and Hemans 118, 168, 170 and melancholic traveler 304 and women as travel writers 302 see also patriarchy; women Geological Society of London 21 geology 21, 335, 337 George, Ernest 352 George III 27, 112, 126 Gerassi-Navarro, Nina 308, 314 Gifra-Adoher, Pere 20 Gil de Zárate, Antonio 38–39 Gillray, James 91 Gilpin, William: The Bridge, Ronda 350 The Cathedral, Cadiz 350 Gate of the Mosque in the Alhambra 350 The Generalife, from the Walls of the Alhambra 350 Gibraltar, North Front 350 The Golden Tower, Seville 350 Murcia 350 On Picturesque Beauty 343, 345 Windmill Hill Road 350 Gladstone, W. E. 167–78 Godoy, Manuel de 60 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust 170 Gómez de Ciudad Real, Fernando 219 Gómez Hermosilla, José 37 Góngora, Luis de, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea 43–44 Gothicism 16, 18, 95, 142, 144, 145, 148 Goytisolo, Juan 166 Graeco-Roman tradition 222, 226 Graham, Maria: and audience/readers 321–22, 327 and Chile 21, 327–39 and Cochranes 96, 98, 99, 100 and culture 321–22 and empire/imperialism 328, 333 and gender 337 and history 21, 96, 327–39 Journal of a Residence in Chile 15, 21, 201, 327–39

373

Journal of a Residence in India 330 Journal of a Voyage to Brazil 12, 102–3 and language 21, 327, 329, 331, 332, 335, 336 and nationalism 330 and revolution 327, 328, 329, 333 and South America 21, 327, 328, 333 and term ‘English’ 310n22 and travel literature 21, 22, 328 Graham, Thomas 328, 329, 330, 333 Grand Tour 341–42, 343 Grant, Anne 164, 170, 177 Gray, Thomas 228 Great Britain: Act of Union (1707) 311–12 Act of Union (1800) 311–12 alliance with Spain 14, 22, 86, 112 alliance with Spanish America 14 antagonism toward Spain 27 Asturian delegation in 111–12, 115, 117, 122–23, 126, 127, 128 and Blanco White 76, 77 and Chile 329–30, 338 and Coleridge 143–44 Creole patriots in 184 empire of 233, 309 and Frances Calderón 309 and Hemans 179 Hispanicity in 18 identification with Spanish America 185 interest in Latin America 57 investments in Spanish America 17, 183, 184, 185–88, 189, 190, 193– 94, 199, 200–203, 205–6, 207, 208–9, 223–24 and liberalism 223 as modern 29 and Peninsular War 148 recognition of Spanish American states 184, 185 as sanctuary of freedom 115 Seditious Meeting Bill 136 and South America 45, 54, 55, 56, 66, 93, 103–4 and Spain 15, 16, 53–54 and Spanish America 56, 185, 298

374

Index

and Spanish imperialism 143 and Sweden 115–16 Treasonable Practice Bill 136 see also Englishness Greenough, George Bellas 147, 337–38 Griffiths, Arthur, Picturesque Europe 22, 348, 352, 353 Gual, Manuel 61 Habeas Corpus 136 Habsburg dynasty 221, 222, 223, 224 Hall, Basil 96–97, 99, 204, 208 Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico 201 Hamilton, Alexander 59, 61 Hamilton, Emma 90 Harlequin and Humpo 138 Harley, John 352 Hayward, Jennifer 12, 328, 329 ‘Hearts of Oak’ 83–84 Heawood, Thomas 348, 352 heimlich/unheimlich 21, 159, 162, 164, 300, 314 Hemans, Felicia 9, 10, 15, 60, 116–17 The Abencerrage 41, 177 ‘Ancient Battle Song’ 117 and Asturians 128 and Blanco White 16–17, 159–79 ‘Casabianca’ 169, 172 and Coleridge 166 A Collection of Peninsular Melodies 117 The Domestic Affections 159 England and Spain 117, 159, 163, 164 family background of 165 The Forest Sanctuary 16–17, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168–79, 189– 93, 195, 196–97, 198, 199, 203, 208 and Irving 276 ‘Lays of Many Lands’ 169 “Miscellaneous Poems” 169, 170 and Peninsular War 111 Poems 117 The Sceptic 163

The Siege of Valencia 19, 41, 117, 160n3, 234, 238–39, 243–46 ‘Songs of Spain’ 117 and Southey 17 and Spanish American independence 22 ‘A Tale of the Secret Tribunal’ 163 There Are Sounds in the Dark Roncesvalles 118 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 18 hero/heroism 81–82, 83, 88–89, 90–91, 96, 99–102 Herrera, Fernando de 219, 228 Hibbert, Samuel, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions 176 history: and Alcalá Galiano 221, 224, 289 and Coleridge 133, 136, 137, 148, 151 and Frances Calderón 300, 313, 316, 324 and Gilpin 345 and Graham 21, 96, 327–39 and Hemans 16, 168, 173, 191, 196 heroic 121 and heterography 33, 34 and Irving 276, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287–88, 289, 290–91, 292, 293 and literature 9, 27, 36–40, 58, 111– 28, 218 and Mill 66 and nationalism 28, 35, 61, 62, 219, 221, 226, 240, 300, 309 and picturesque 22 and Prescott 314 and Robertson 54, 184 and Romantics 13, 16, 35, 282 and Romantic tourists 20, 279–80 South America in 83 and Viscardo y Guzmán 61–66 see also memory; past Hita, Arcipreste de 219 Hita, Ginés Pérez de 291, 293 Guerras civiles de Granada 41, 177, 287 Hodgson, Adam 164, 170, 177 Letters from North America 171, 175

Index

Holland, Lady (Elizabeth Vassall Fox) 160 Holland, Lord (Henry Richard VassallFox) 10, 37–38, 43, 60, 61, 160, 215, 219 Holland House 10, 38, 39, 43, 160, 163– 64 Holland House Whigs 44–45 Hughes, Terence Mahon 15–16, 109, 113 Iberia Won 110, 124–28 Revelations of Spain in 1845 124 Humboldt, Alexander von 12, 143, 164, 177, 186, 317 and Graham 337 and Hemans 170 Personal Narrative 178, 337–38 Views of Nature 66 Hunter, John 27, 116 identity: British 311–13 and Coleridge 147 and Frances Calderón 20–21, 298, 300, 301, 302, 305, 310, 311, 313–16, 318, 319–20 and nationality 13, 26, 64, 74, 138, 144, 219 Incas 11, 83 Inchbald, Elizabeth 246 Inquisition 16, 213 and Alcalá Galiano 220, 221, 222, 223 and Blanco White 166 and Coleridge 136, 145–46 and Hemans 163, 164, 171, 172, 173, 179 and Irving 288, 289 see also auto de fé Iphigenia myth 237 irony 20, 278, 283, 286, 289 Irving, Washington 22, 37, 164, 275–94, 352 The Alhambra 20, 275–94 Bracebridge Hall 172 A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada 20, 275, 276, 277, 285– 89, 290, 291, 293 and Hemans 170

375

Legends of the Conquest of Spain 277 letter to Aspinwall 286 The Sketch Book 278 Italian literature 220 Italy 342 Jaccaci, August F., On the Trail of Don Quixote 356–58 Jacob, William 32, 162 Travels in the South of Spain 162 Jácome, Adrián 122 Jardine, Alexander 32 Jesuits 12, 61, 64, 195, 218 Jewett, William 237 Jews 173, 239 Jiménez, Juan Ramón 269 Johnson, Samuel 29, 30 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de 68, 219, 223, 228 Juan Manuel, Infante of Castille, Book of the Conde Lucanor 219 Junta(s): Asturian 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 122, 126 Galician and Andalusian 112 Seville 122 Spanish 67, 68, 69, 74 in Spanish America 75 Spanish revolutionary 160, 165 Kamen, Henry 34 Kant, Immanuel, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime 342–43 Kaplan, Amy 308, 314 Keats, John 191, 305, 306 Kitson, Peter 13 Knight, Henry Gally 15–16, 128 Iberia’s Crisis 121–22 lderim, a Syrian Tale 121 Phrosyne, a Grecian Tale 121 Knight, Richard Payne 343 Laborda, Agustín 37 Lady of the Cave (Covadonga) 109 Lafuente, Modesto, Historia general de España 33, 286–87 La Mancha 341, 355, 356–58

376

Index

Lamb, Charles 141, 262 Prologue to Remorse 139 Lampillas, Saverio abbé, Saggio storicoapologetico della letteratura spagnola 218 Lancaster, Joseph 58 Landor, Walter Savage 90, 199 Count Julian 10 Gebir 235 language 18 and Graham 21, 327, 329, 331, 332, 335, 336 and Unamuno 19, 251, 254 Lardner, Dyonisius: Cabinet Cyclopaedia 34 Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal 44 Latin America 39, 66 and Blanco White 76 British investments in 183 and British women travelers 301, 313, 328, 339 independence of 53, 54, 59 see also South America; Spanish America law 219, 222, 223 Lawrence, Rose D’Aguilar 160, 161–62 Leask, Nigel 12, 40, 299, 316 Lee, Harriet 239–40 Lee, Sophia, Almeyda; Queen of Granada 19, 234, 238–43, 246 Legado Andalusí, El 280, 282 Leitch, Richard Principal 352 León, Luis de 219, 220 Leopardi, Giacomo, ‘La Ginestra’ 254 Lesage, Alain-René, Gil Blas de Santillane 27, 28, 29 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, The Monk 26 liberalism: and Alcalá Galiano 214, 216, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224 British 223 and Romanticism 18 Lieven, Dorothea, Princess 103, 185–86 Lima 15 Lista, Alberto 60, 166 Liverpool, Lord 187

Livoy, Timothée de 29–30 Lloréns, Vicente 166, 226 Lloyd, George 117 Lockhart, John Gibson 37, 164, 170 Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic 36 Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk 174 London 56, 57, 58, 183, 202 London Geological Society 328–29, 336 London Stock Exchange 81, 82 López, John-David 10 López de Sedano, J. J., Parnaso español 38 López de Vargas Machuca, Tomás, Atlas de España 31 López Méndez, Luis 60 Luis de Granada, Fray 219 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 227 MacGregor, Sir Gregor 194 Machado, Antonio 269 Mackintosh, Sir James 81, 98 Mahn, Berthold 356 Maid of Saragossa 10 Manifest Destiny 71, 308 Mann, Sir Horace 61 Manrique, Jorge 219 Mariana, Juan de 287 Historiæ de rebus Hispaniæ 33, 38, 288 marriage 235, 236, 238 and Frances Calderón 300, 313, 314, 315, 316, 319, 319–20 and Thomas Cochrane 95 Marryat, Thomas 106 The Naval Officer, or Scenes in the Life and Adventures of Frank Mildmay 88–89 Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco: Bosquejo histórico de la política de España 34 Poética 37 Matarrosa, Viscount 111, 122 Maturin, Charles, Bertram 139 Mayáns de Siscar, Gregorio, Orígenes de la lengua española 38, 217 Mayer, Brantz 307 melancholy 20–21, 298, 303–7, 309, 319, 323, 324, 330–31

Index

Meléndez Valdés, Juan 37, 228 Mellor, Anne 19, 245–46 Melville, Lord 59 memory 173 and Blanco White 177 and Hemans 174, 177, 196 and Irving 276, 279, 281–82, 284, 290, 291–92, 293–94 see also history; past Mendibil, Pablo de 40 Metastasio, Pietro (Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi) 220 Mexican-American War 317 Mexican Exhibition 183, 188, 207–8 Mexico: and Blanco White 71, 75 and British investment 202, 205 and Frances Calderón 297–324 and Humboldt 143 loan to 188 and primitivism 302 and Robertson 11 Mier Noriega y Guerra, José Servando Teresa de 60 Mill, James 56, 59, 70, 185 ‘Emancipation of Spanish America’ 66 Mill, John Stuart 215 Miller, John 102 Miranda, Fernando Álvarez de 111, 122 Miranda, Francisco de: and American resources 66 and Blanco White 74, 76, 77 capture of 94 and El Colombiano 14, 71, 72, 75 and equality 73 mediation by 22, 58–60 and patriotism and commerce 185 ‘Pensamientos de un inglés sobre el estado y presente crisis de los negocios de la América del sur’ 70 Proclamas 65, 67 and South American independence 12, 54–56, 64–65, 67–71 support for 86 and Túpac Amaru 62 and Viscardo y Guzmán 61

377

Miravalles, Francisco 126 Mitford, Mary Russell, Blanch 10 modernity: and Alcalá Galiano 18 of Britain 18, 138, 143, 208 and Frances Calderón 302, 305, 309, 311, 313, 314, 322, 323 and Irving 282 and Spain 29, 164, 217, 218 and Spanish America 18, 208 Molina, Juan Ignacio 12 Compendio de la historia geográfica, natural, y civil del reyno de Chile 60 Montesquieu 218, 225 Montgomery, James, The West Indies 12 Moody, Jane 16 Moore, Sir John 14, 27, 31, 69 Moors: art and architecture of 347, 352 and Asturias 109 and Blanco White 166 and Borrow 346 and Byron 123 and Coleridge 136, 147, 150, 151 and Griffiths 352 and Hemans 15, 117, 118, 164, 173, 239 invasion by 114 and Irving 279, 286, 288 and Lee 239, 240, 241, 242 and Spanish liberty 90 and Wells 347 Mora, José Joaquín de 39, 225 and Alcalá Galiano 18, 214–15 and British Romanticism 213 and El correo literario y político de Londres 18, 57–58 Morán, Vicente 126 More, Hannah 246 Morton, Thomas 203 Columbus 12, 185 motherhood 243, 244, 245, 246 Moyano, Claudio 39 Murphy, Martin 167 Murray, John (publisher) 161, 162, 169 Muslims 16, 163, 219, 234–35

378

Index

Napier, William, History of the War in the Peninsula 44 Napoleon I 53 and Agg 114 and Asturias 109 and Blanco White 75–76 and Cochrane 15, 83, 87, 98 and Coleridge 140 defeat at Waterloo 16 invasion by 14, 53, 54, 57, 86 and Miranda 67, 68, 69–70 and religion 145 and San Martin 94 siege by 75 Spanish rebellion against 9, 22, 27, 66 see also France Napoleonic wars: and Blanco White 71 and Coleridge 133, 135, 142 and war literature 110 see also Peninsular War nationalism 19 and Anderson 53, 300 and Bhabha 312 and Coleridge 133 and Frances Calderón 297, 299, 305, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314–15, 316, 318–19, 319–20, 322, 323 and Graham 330 growth of 299 and Hemans 243 and New World 14 and Spanish culture 222 and travel literature 309 and women writers 235, 246 natives/indigenous population 192, 195– 96, 307 natural history 21, 327–39 nature: and Gilpin 345 and Unamuno 19, 257, 258–60, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266–67, 269 Nelson, Horatio 15, 85–86, 90 New England 308 New Historicism 16, 128 Newman, John Henry 161, 166, 167 New Monthly Magazine 39

New World 16, 163 and Frances Calderón 312 and Hemans 159, 164, 175, 177, 196 and nationalism 14 and Planché 188 and possibility vs. underdevelopment 307 Nikolas Böhl von Faber, Johann 214–15, 222, 225 Floresta de rimas antiguas castellanas 37 Nootka Sound crisis 12 North America: and Frances Calderón 320 and Hemans 171, 189, 203, 308, 310, 321 Norton, Andrews 162, 169 nostalgia: and Frances Calderón 307, 309, 310, 311, 314, 318, 323 and Irving 279 O’Brien, Patrick 106 O’Higgins, Bernardo 94, 98 Old World, and Hemans 159, 160, 164, 171, 174, 175 Orientalism 221, 234 Ossian 95 Other 304n17 and Frances Calderón 300, 301, 312, 317, 322 and Graham 21 and Grand Tour 342 and Hemans 245 and Romantic (re)writing of Spain 33 and Spanish imaginary 234 Ottomans 81, 105, 106 Otway, Thomas, Venice Preserv’d 136 Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man 9, 12 Paleographia española 38 Paley, William 164 parody 288, 289, 341 past: and Frances Calderón 304, 305, 308, 316, 323 and Irving 275, 279, 281, 283, 285, 286, 290–91, 292

Index

national 35 see also history; memory patriarchy 235, 236. see also gender; women Pauw, Cornelius De 12 Pelayo 10, 15, 109, 120, 123, 126 Peninsular War 13 and Alhambra 276 and British attitudes toward Spain 9– 10, 18, 41 and Capmany 42 and Cochrane 86–87 and Coleridge 16, 133, 134, 142, 143, 148, 150–51, 152 and Hemans 117, 118, 159, 163, 164 and Knight 121 and maps 31 and Mill 66 and Napoleon’s downfall 134 and Siete Partidas 219 and travel writers 32 and war literature 109–11, 128 see also Napoleonic wars Percy, Thomas 164, 170, 177 persona: and Frances Calderón 20, 317 and Irving 275, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287–88, 289, 290 Peru 60, 62, 81, 94, 99, 103, 104, 201 Pestrucci, Signor 17, 187 Petrarch, Francesco 175 Peyron, Jean François, Nouveau voyage en Espagne, fait en 1777 & 1778 30 Philip II 28 picaresque 222, 225 Picton, Thomas 61 picturesque, the 341–58 Pilgrim Fathers 175 Pitt, William 55, 56, 62, 64, 65, 76, 136 Place, Francis 92 Planché, James Robinson, Cortez 183, 188, 190, 205–7 Pocock, Nicholas 85 Pons, André 72–73 Popham, Sir Home 59, 66 Portugal 31, 86, 103 Pradt, Abbé de 186

379

Pratt, Mary Louise 12, 66, 185, 304n16 Prescott, William H. 38, 299, 313, 315– 17, 320, 321 A History of the Conquest of Mexico 314 History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella 34 Preston, T. R. 44 Price, Uvedale 343 primitivism 281, 282, 297, 306, 307, 312, 317–18 Protestantism: and Blanco White 171 and Coleridge 144, 145 and Hemans 16, 159, 163, 164, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 192 see also religion Pulgar, Hernando del 287 Quevedo, Francisco de 222 Quincey, Thomas De, Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets 252–53 Quintana, Manuel José 60 Lives of Celebrated Spaniards 44 race/purity of blood (casticismo) 71, 74, 166, 173, 243 Racine, Karen 58–59 radicalism 90–92, 93, 136–37. see also revolution Raynal, Abbé, Histoire des Deux Indes 195 Real Academia Española, Fuero Juzgo 38 Reconquest 19, 75, 123, 124–25, 128, 239, 285, 286, 288, 294 religion: and Blanco White 161, 167, 171 and Coleridge 133, 144–45, 148 and Hemans 17, 163 and Irving 293 and Unamuno 263–64 see also Catholicism; Protestantism Renshaw Street Chapel 161 Repertorio Americano 58 revolution: and Blanco White 71, 72 British support for 86 and Cochrane 83, 92

380

Index

in France 61 and Graham 327, 328, 329, 333 and Miranda 65, 70 and Romantic writers 11, 53, 54 South American 93 and Viscardo 62, 64, 65 see also radicalism Rich, Obadiah 37 Richardson, Alan 12, 23, 235 Ricoeur, Paul 20, 292 Río de la Plata 60 Roberts, David 341, 352 Picturesque Sketches in Spain 345 Robertson, William 12, 208 The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America 11, 54, 184, 206n85 History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V 33 Robinson, Henry Crabb 112 Roderick 90 Rodríguez de Castro, José, Biblioteca española 38 Rodríguez Mohedano, Pedro, Historia literaria de España 35 Rodríguez Mohedano, Rafael, Historia literaria de España 35 Rodríguez Pinilla, Cándido 266 romance: and Agg 113 and Cochrane 96, 101 and Don Quijote 9 Gothic 95 and Hemans 168 and Irving 283, 284, 286, 288, 290 and Restoration stage 27 romance (Spanish genre) 36, 37, 219, 225, 227 Roman literature 226 Romanticism: and Alcalá Galiano 213, 216, 220, 221, 225–27, 228 ideals of 121 and Irving 279, 283, 286 and liberalism 18 and Unamuno 19, 249, 268 Rosas, action at 87–88 Roscoe, Thomas:

The Spanish Novelists 43 The Tourist in Spain 341 Roscoe, William 160, 161 Ruiz de Apodaca, Juan 27, 112, 122 Russell, Gillian 16 Saavedra, Ángel de, Duque de Rivas 227 El moro expósito 214, 225 Saglia, Diego 16, 19, 54, 117, 119, 160n3, 168, 233, 239, 276 Poetic Castles in Spain 10 Said, Edward 234 Salvá, Vicente 39 Sánchez, Joaquín 126 Sánchez, Tomás Antonio, Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo XV 36, 38 Sánchez de las Brozas, Francisco 220 San Martin (Martín), José de 76, 94, 96, 98, 99 Santa Anna, López de 323 Sarmiento, Martín, Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas españoles 38 Schiller, Friedrich: Die Räuber 233 The Maid of Orleans 170 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 214, 215, 222 Schmidtmeyer, Peter 208 Travels to Chile 201 science/scientific narrative 13, 328, 332, 335, 336, 337 Scotland 309, 310–11, 314, 316 Scott, Sir Walter 10 and Asturias 114 and Hemans 117, 161 Ivanhoe 40 and K. Cochrane 99, 100 and Peninsular War 9, 111 and Roderick 90 The Talisman 40 and T. Cochrane 15, 81, 87, 96 The Vision of Don Roderick 110 Scottish Enlightenment 37, 40 Sempere y Guarinos, Juan: Biblioteca de los mejores escritores del reinado de Carlos III 38 Teatro nuevo español 38

Index

Semple, Robert 32 Serrano, Tomás, Saggio storicoapologetico della letteratura spagnola 218 Shakespeare, William 98, 136, 222, 227, 240 Taming of the Shrew 237 Shelley, Mary 44 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 227, 249, 250 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 133, 149 The Critic 26 The Duenna 26 Pizarro 54, 185, 203 Shoberl, Frederic, Inglaterra, Escocia e Irlanda 40 Simonde de Sismondi, J.-C.-L. 18, 218 De la littérature du midi de l’Europe 36, 217 slavery, Atlantic 12, 18, 70–71, 74 Smith, Adam 223 Theory of Moral Sentiments 16, 138 Smith, William 59 South America: and Britain 54, 55, 56, 103–4 British fascination with 183 and British intervention 45 and Cochrane 15, 81, 82, 83, 106–7 and Graham 21, 327, 328, 333 and Hemans 163, 177, 178 and revolution 93 and Spanish imperialism 143 see also Latin America; Spanish America Southey, Robert: and Alcalá Galiano 215, 227 and Blanco White 60, 161, 163, 166 Chronicle of the Cid 36 and Cochrane 81, 92 Colloquies 199 and Convention of Cintra 89, 90 and Dunham 34 and Frances Calderón 316, 317 and Hemans 17 Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal 28, 144 letter to Landor 199 Life of Nelson 90

381

Madoc 13, 185 and Peninsular War 9, 44, 111 and revolution 92 Roderick, the Last of the Goths 41, 90 and Spanish American independence 22 A Tale of Paraguay 13, 17, 183, 189– 90, 194–96, 203, 208 and translation 43 Spain 60 and Agg 114 and Alcalá Galiano 18 and Blanco White 72, 74 and British alliance 22, 112 and British antagonism 27 and British culture 25 censorship law (1558) 28 changing British opinion concerning 204–5 and Chile 93–94 and Cochrane 85, 86, 87, 97 and Coleridge 133, 135, 138, 142–43, 148, 152 colonial government of 63, 64, 76 colonies of 57, 68, 69, 70, 86, 143 and constitutionalism 163–64, 173 Constitution of 1812 134, 145, 219 cultural constructions of 31 emancipation from 333 empire of 14, 60, 61–64, 65, 68, 74, 159, 164 españoles americanos 53, 73, 74, 75 foreign travellers to 32 geocultural construction of 33 geography of 30, 31–42 government of 68 and guerra de la independencia 27 and Hemans 159, 171, 179, 191 history of 33–35 as immutable and backward 28–29 and Irving 276–78 Ley de Instrucción Pública 39 literature of 18, 19–20, 35–39, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219–30, 250–51 maps of 14, 31–32 monarchy of 215 monopoly system of 204 Napoleonic invasion of 57

382

Index

and neoclassicism 218, 220 oligarchy of 215 as parable of development and decline 38 and the picturesque 341, 343, 345 and Picturesque Tour 341–58 prison system of 45 recall of university students by 28 and religion 144–45 as Romantic intervention zone 44–46 and the sublime 342–43 and Unamuno 250–51 as unknown 29–31 uprising against Napoleon 111 Spain, Kingdom of 27 Spanish America 16 British fascination with 203 British identification with 185, 203 British investments in 183, 184, 185– 88, 189, 190, 193–94, 199, 200– 203, 205–6, 207, 208–9, 223–24 and debt crisis 183 émigrés from 14 españoles europeos 53, 73, 75 and Hemans 190–93, 195, 196–97, 198, 199, 203 independence of 9, 13, 22, 66, 185 in Planché 205–7 revolutions as justified in 204 in Southey 190, 194–96, 197–200, 203 see also Latin America; South America Spanish Armada 85 Spanish chronicles 207 Spanish Cortes 71, 72, 74, 75 Spanish imaginary 144, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 246 Spanish Junta. see Junta(s) Spanish language 216–17, 218–19, 223, 227–28 Spanish Revolution 143 Spanish Romanticism 222, 225 Spanish Succession, War of 25 Spencer, Herbert 250 Spurr, David 304 Staël, Madame de 317 De L’Allemagne 215

St Asaph, Bishop of 161 St Domingue 70 Stevenson, W. B. 99 Stockdale, John Joseph 31 The History of the Inquisitions 144 St Vincent, Lord 81 subject position, and Frances Calderón 300, 305, 307, 309, 313, 323 sublime, the 342–43, 345 Sweden 115–16 Sweet, Nanora 10 Swinburne, Henry 32 Travels through Spain 28, 30 Tapia, Eugenio de, Historia de la civilización española desde la invasión de los árabes hasta la época presente 38 Tasso, Torquato 220 Temple, Laura Sophia, The Siege of Zaragosa and Other Poems 10 theatre/drama 16 and Alcalá Galiano 225, 227 and Coleridge 137–38, 140, 141, 142–43, 148, 149 and gender 233–46 and history 148 Thelwall, John 136, 137, 203 The Incas 12, 184–85 Thom, John Hamilton, Life of Joseph Blanco White 161, 166 Ticken, William: History of Spanish Literature 36, 37– 38, 39 Santos de Montenos; or Annals of a Patriot Family 10 Ticknor, George, History of Spanish Literature 34 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, Storia della letteratura italiana 218 Tlaxcalans 11 Tofiño de San Miguel, Vicente, Atlas Marítimo de España 31 Torre de las Infantas 352 tourism 276, 277, 278, 279–80, 284, 285, 290, 291 Townsend, John 33 Trafalgar, Battle of 85, 86

Index

translation/translatio 19, 67, 71, 233, 239, 243, 246 transnational space 56, 57, 60, 71 transnational theory 57 trauma 167, 172, 174 travel literature 13, 22, 44 changing views of Spain in 32–33 commonplaces of Spain in 29–30 fascination with 20 and Frances Calderón 21, 297, 298, 301, 302, 304, 317, 321, 341 and Graham 21, 328 illustrated 347–48 and investment in South America 201–2 mass consumption of 299, 342 and nationalism 309 and the picturesque 22, 341–42 and South America 83 Trip to Spain, A 25 Trollope, Frances, Domestic Manners of the Americans 321 Trueba y Cossío, Joaquín Telésforo de 40 The Romance of History: Spain 39 Tuke, Samuel, The Adventures of Five Hours 27 Túpac Amaru I 62, 63, 64 Túpac Amaru II 11, 62, 63, 64 Turnbull, John 65 Tyler, Royall 262 Unamuno, Miguel de 19, 22, 249–70 ‘¡Adentro!’ 259–60 Andanzas y Visiones 253, 254 Cancionero: diario poético 253 ‘Cantos de noche’ 253, 266 ‘Ciudad, Campo, Paisajes y Recuerdos’ 258 ‘Ciudad y campo’ 257 ‘Credo poético’ 255, 256 ‘De la enseñanza superior en España’ 250 ‘Denso, Denso’ 255 ‘El perfecto pescador de caña’ 253, 261 ‘El silencio de la cima’ 260 ‘En los arribes del Duero’ 259 ‘En Pagazarri’ 260

383

‘La Flecha’ 262, 264 ‘¡Id con Dios!’ 255 letter to Pedro Jiménez Ilundáin 254 Paisajes 253, 254, 262 ‘Paisajes del alma’ 260 Poesías 253, 254, 255, 259 ‘Puesta del sol’ 263 ‘Recuerdos de niñez y mocedad’ 265 Rimas de Dentro 253 ‘Sobre la continuidad histórica’ 264– 65 ‘Wordsworth’ 268 uncanny, the 16, 159, 163, 164, 169, 170. see also heimlich/unheimlich Unitarianism 161, 167 United States 71, 307, 314, 317 Unwin, T. Fisher 356 Urdiales, Federico 252 Valdivia 103 Valente, José Ángel 269 Vansittart, Nicholas 59 Variedades 18, 57–58, 167 Vaughan, Charles, Narrative of the Siege of Zaragoza 151 Vedia, Enrique de 39 Vega, Garcilaso de la 220 Vega, Lope de 222 Venezuela 72, 86 Victoria 106 Vierge, Daniel Urrabieta 356–57 Viscardo y Guzmán, Juan Pablo 14, 60, 61–64, 65, 74 Carta a los españoles americanos 53, 56, 61–62, 63–64, 66, 67, 185 Visigoths 217 Vision of the Sun; or the Orphan of Peru, The 17, 187 Vittoria 352 Voltaire 29, 30, 40 Walton, Izaac, The Compleat Angler 262 Walton, William 185 war 238, 240 civil 21, 334 and Graham 339 and Lee 243 literature of 109–11, 128

384

Index

theater of 233–34 Warburton, H. 336 Watson, Robert, History of the Reign of Philip the Second 33–34 Webster, Daniel 175 Weekly Miscellany 62 Wellesley, Sir Arthur 14, 31, 69, 86–87, 134 Wellington, Lord 66, 69 Wells, Nathaniel Armstrong, The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain 22, 346–47 Werner, Carl, Gibraltar and Spain 348 Whately, Edward 162, 167, 168 Whately, Richard 161, 162, 167 White, Ferdinand 171 Whitelocke, John 94 Whymper, Edward 348, 352 Wilberforce, William 60 Williams, Helen Maria, Peru 11, 12–13, 62, 184–85, 203 Wilson, John, The Convict 170 Wolfson, Susan 10, 236, 245 women 243, 246 and Blanco White 166 and Frances Calderón 306, 312, 317, 319 and geology 335 and Hemans 160, 243 and Lee 243 as melancholic travelers 304 and Spanish imaginary 235 subaltern status of 234, 235 as travel writers 297, 301, 302 see also gender; patriarchy Wordsworth, William 15 and Alcalá Galiano 227, 228, 229 and Asturias 109, 120–21, 128 and Frances Calderón 304, 306 and Hemans 117, 161, 168, 170, 171, 178 and Peninsular War 89–90, 118–21 and Spanish American independence 22 and Unamuno 19, 249, 250, 251–70 and Walton 262 WORKS ‘The Affliction of Margaret’ 253

‘The Child is the Father of Man’ 253 ‘A Complaint’ 253 Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, to Each Other and to the Common Enemy, at this Crisis 118–19 The Excursion 171, 253, 266 ‘Expostulation and Reply’ 260– 61 ‘The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale’ 257–58 ‘Her Eyes Are Wild, Her Head Is Bare’ 253 ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ 257, 265–66 ‘Invocation to the Earth’ 253 ‘Laodamia’ 253 ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ 258 Lyrical Ballads 251, 255, 258, 260 ‘The Mad Mother’ 267 ‘Memoir’ 254–55, 264 ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’ 253, 265 ‘A Parsonage in Oxfordshire’ 253 Peninsular War sonnets 110 ‘The Pet Lamb’ 253 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth 252, 269 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads 228 ‘Repentance’ 253, 267 ‘Resolution and Independence’ 253 ‘The River Duddon’ 261, 262, 263 ‘Ruth’ 253, 267 ‘The Tables Turned’ 260, 261 ‘The Thorn’ 253 ‘To a Butterfly’ 253, 267 ‘To a Skylark’ 253 ‘To My Sister’ 256 ‘To my sister’ 259

Index

‘To the Spade of a Friend’ 256– 57, 259, 261 ‘Written upon a Blank Leaf in The Compleat Angler’ 253, 261

xylography 22 Yankees 307, 308, 309, 320

385